Critics’ Predictions Over ObamaCare Enrollment Coming True

President Obama’s claim last spring that 8 million people had enrolled in ObamaCare was confirmed to be false from the head of the agency overseeing the law. Critics and investigative reports, including reports from PPD, were warning that enrollment numbers coming out of the White House were about as true as the president’s initial promise that Americans could keep their health care plans.

Now, testimony from Marilyn Tavenner, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told a congressional committee that “as of August 15, this year, we have 7.3 million Americans enrolled in Health Insurance Marketplace coverage and these are individuals who paid their premiums.”

Tavenner noted that a major problem arose when the White House began counting those who did pay, because as it turns out, simply signing up without paying isn’t quite the same as paying customers when CMS counted who was enrolled.

“It’s not enough to sign up. You have to sign up and pay on a regular basis to really be enrolled,” Doug Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said as he stated the obvious. The CBO, consequently, quietly dropped their initial claim that the law would reduce the deficit, a scoring used frequently by supportive Democrats and the president.

“CBO and JCT can no longer determine exactly how the provisions of the ACA that are not related to the expansion of health insurance coverage have affected their projections of direct spending and revenues,” the CBO wrote in a tiny footnote prior to releasing two new studies documenting negative impacts of the law; an explosion in deficit spending to crippling levels and a devastating economic loss of at least 2.3 million jobs.

“The provisions that expanded coverage established entirely new programs or components of programs that can be isolated and reassessed. Isolating the incremental effects of those provisions on previously existing programs and revenues four years after enactment of the ACA is not possible.”

Non-paid enrollment and just flat-out bogus applications have taken a toll on both state and private insurance enrollments numbers, which are now shrinking according to officials.

“They’ve deteriorated quite a bit, this was anticipated to some degree, but I think it’s exceeded expectations in some cases,” said Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

In PPD’s home state of Florida, a majority of the state’s health insurers had already proposed higher rates for 2015 back in August. Insurance premiums under ObamaCare in the Sunshine state were slated to rise an average of 13.2 percent, according to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation.

Now, insurers say their enrollments are 220,000 lower than the administration’s claim made in April, decreasing from 983,000 to a little over 762,000. That represents a drop of more than 20 percent, but could mean far more in cost increases, as insurers will have to find the anticipated money to assume ObamaCare’s high risk pool from somewhere.

A state official also said they had numerous duplicate enrollments due in large part to the infamous website problems on Healthcare.gov. David Kennedy, a “white hat hacker” who testified at the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee hearing in November, 2013, warned that it would be “impossible” for the many ObamaCare website problems to be ironed out in a few weeks, let alone ensure the safety of users’ information.

The other loss in enrollments, the official said, simply didn’t pay their premiums and have lost their coverage, which is a problem insurance companies are reporting nationwide. The loss of enrollments, again, translates into a loss of revenue that is essential if insurers are to sustain costs associated with the high risk pool.

And the Sunshine State may actually be one of the better examples.

“I’ve talked to a number of insurance companies around the industry and they’re indicating that they’re down as low as 70 percent of the original enrollments they had,” said Robert Laszewski, an insurance expert at Health Policy and Strategy Associates.

A February report released by PPD documented that insurers were worried that signs pointed to a real danger that up to 30 percent of total enrollees were not paying customers. Proponents of the law essentially shrugged off the data.

Mark Bertolini, the CEO of Aetna, the nation’s third largest insurer, recently told Laszewski that out of the 720,000 people who signed up for ObamaCare coverage on an exchange as of May 20, just 600,000 were actually paying customers.

They are not even done tallying up the losses. According to Bertolini, who was reached for comment, the company expects that numbers will continue to fall to “just over 500,000” by the end of the year. That would leave Aetna’s paid enrollment down approximately 30 percent from its original sign-up numbers, and the actuaries scrambling to calculate how to make up the difference in new premiums and other costs.

Most independent insurance analysts believe ObamaCare enrollments nationwide and across the industry, will continue to decline.

“So the enrollment that the administration was touting in March and April,” Capretta said, “I think you could bring that down by at least 20 percent going into the end of the year.”

At this point, the Congressional Budget Office, which was truly established to justify “Great Society” government programs, is heading for another projection disaster. The agency says it is currently projecting that 13 million total enrollments will be measured at the end of the next open enrollment in February of 2015.

“If we’ve got closer to 6 million enrolled,” Laszewski said, “they’d have to enroll more people in 2015 than they did this past year.”

If not, there is always another taxpayer bailout that was written into the law by Democratic constituencies set to profit whether the industry collapses or profits — lawyers.