The Pitiful State Of Obamacare : Lies And Fairy Tales

En Garde In The Bunker

En Garde In The Bunker

So this is the pitiful state of Obamacare, the “signature achievement” that Obama will take into the sunset of his years. After all the propaganda, the lying, the collusion with the press, and the hoards of money wasted and disappeared into the ether, the enrollment numbers released yesterday are especially bad considering they made it illegal not to have insurance! In the end, We The People know this was never about providing insurance for anyone; it was always about the Left seizing control of America’s huge healthcare industry.

When someone buys something on credit and fails to make even the first payment, it’s a pretty good indicator that they’re gonna be a permanent deadbeat; miss a car payment or two, and expect the repossession-guy to show up while you’re sleeping and haul your vehicle off to the repo-yard. Once they’ve been assigned the job, they don’t waste a lot of time in coming after you.

Will that happen with Obamacare? I hardly think so. The deadbeats will simply be allowed to stay in the plan and will continue to consume services and bilk the system in time-honored fashion, deficits will continue to grow and grow and grow into the pitiful state of Obamacare.

Another factor in the release of the numbers is assuming that if a person pays their first premium, they will continue to pay all their premiums and be a happy Obamacare customer for life. That certainly is not going to be true. Every month, some percentage will shed their coverage as their financial circumstances change; mind you for the most part, you can’t purchase new policies outside the enrollment period, so there won’t be many new policies added. The number of dropped policies after one payment, as of March, was between 3 and 5% according to the insurance companies – and that’s with only one or two payment cycles. That could mean 100,000 or more dropping their coverage every month; by the end of the year who knows what the enrollment number will look like.

Before we get to the full body of the release, it seems likely that the young and healthy will be more likely to let their coverage lapse over time. The demographics will probably get worse as we go along, and you’ve got to drink some serious Kool-aid to think you’ll get those people back in the future once they’ve tried the program and quit. As a for-instance, my two younger sons in their mid-twenties are so busy working to pay off their college loans that they’ve no money to pay insurance premiums. Pay-as-you-go is the immediate future for them and millions like them.

More on the pitiful state of Obamacare from John Hayward …

John Hayward, Human Events

John Hayward, Human Events

No serious analyst believes the ObamaCare “signup” totals pushed by the White House are accurate.  The media makes a pretense of relaying these numbers as though they were valid data, when every single reporter knows they are not.  In this way, talking-point energy is generated; there’s lots of chatter about 7 million “signups” on April 1, or 8 million today, or whatever figure the Administration is pushing out, but the caveats are muttered in a very low voice… usually as a single sentence about how the Administration refuses to release the total of paid and valid ObamaCare policies sold, or their demographic breakdown.  Video news reports frequently forget to mention these qualifications at all.  Print reporters usually claim the total of paid policies is “unknown,” even though everyone knows the Department of Health and Human Services has the number.  If it was good news, they would of course release it immediately.

Thanks to work by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, we have a better idea of why the Most Transparent Administration in History is guarding those figures as closely as Barack Obama’s activities on the night of September 11, 2012.  Previous estimates from the insurance industry held that 20 to 25 percent of the reported ObamaCare signups were unpaid and invalid, but the actual numbers from the federal exchange system turn out to be considerably worse:

Data provided to the committee by every insurance provider in the health care law’s Federally Facilitated Marketplace (FFM) shows that, as of April 15, 2014, only 67 percent of individuals and families that had selected a health plan in the federally facilitated marketplace had paid their first month’s premium and therefore completed the enrollment process. Nationwide, only 25 percent of paid enrollees are ages 18 to 34. The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations today invited the leaders of some of the nation’s largest insurance providers and their trade groups to testify at a hearing, “PPACA Enrollment and the Insurance Industry,” on Wednesday, May 7, 2014, at 10:15 a.m. in room 2123 Rayburn House Office Building.

House Energy and Commerce Committee members sent letters requesting specific enrollment data, including the number of individuals who have paid their first month’s premium and demographic breakdowns. The committee has compiled the data that provides a snapshot of the true enrollment picture as of April 15, 2014, after the official end of the open enrollment period. Due to the administration’s repeated and unilateral extensions and changes, as well as the fact that many insurers have reported that individuals will still have time to pay their first month’s premium, the committee plans to ask the insurers in the federally facilitated marketplace to provide an enrollment update by May 20, 2014.

On April 17, 2014, President Obama declared the success of his law, claiming that 8 million Americans had signed up for health insurance, but data from the insurance providers reveals that the president’s figure is largely misleading. As of April 15, 2014, insurers informed the committee that only 2.45 million had paid their first month’s premium for coverage obtained through the federally facilitated marketplace. While the administration has relied on questionable nationwide figures to boast the law’s success, the state-by-state breakdown compiled by the committee underscores the serious problems facing some states.

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