posted 04-01-2014 03:19 PM                  

The article

White House boasts 7 MILLION Obamacare enrollments, but secretive study shows just 858,000 newly insured Americans have paid up!

Press secretary Jay Carney will only say 'we're aggregating a lot of data' when asked how many enrollees have paid for coverage

Also dodges questions about damning study that showed very few Obamacare customers were uninsured before the law took effect

Percentages from a hush-hush RAND Corporation study suggest barely 858,000 previously uninsured Americans have enrolled and paid premiums

President Obama will deliver a triumphant speech Tuesday afternoon following a panic-induced enrollment flood at the last minute

HHS Secretary Sebelius met a televised challenge Monday about 'unpopular' Obamacare with lengthy awkward silence

ByDavid Martosko, U.s. Political Editor

PUBLISHED: 10:21 EST, 1 April 2014 | UPDATED: 14:35 EST, 1 April 2014

A triumphant White House press secretary Jay Carney stopped short of saying 'I told you so' on tuesday, but chided a sparse press corps in the briefing room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for ever doubting that the Obamacare system would enroll 7 million Americans.

'At midnight last night we surpassed everyone's expectations,' he boasted, 'at least everyone in this room.'

Carney announced an enrollment total of 7,041,000, not including stragglers who waited until march 31 to sign up on some state-based enrollment websites.

But while he took great pains to enphasize that the number would grow – saying 'we're still waiting on data from state exchanges' – he dodged tough questions about other statistics that reporters thought he should have had at the ready.

Those numbers included how many Americans have paid for their insurance policies, and are actually insured. Also, he had no answer to the thorny question of how few signups represented people who had no insurance before the Affordable Care Act took effect.

Numbers from one study, a RAND Corporation effort that has been kept under wraps, suggests that barely 858,000 previously uninsured Americans – nowhere near 7 million – paid for new policies and joined the ranks of the insured by Monday night.

Aside from the issue of the numbers' likely decrease when non-paying enrollments are taken into account, administration officials have been coy about a RAND Corporation study that shows relatively few Obamacare enrollees were previously uninsured.

'What I can tell you is that we expect there to be a good mix of people who were previously uninsured who now have insurance,' White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday.

'Certainly, there’s a significant number who now have qualified for Medicaid in those states that expanded Medicaid who will have insurance who didn’t have it before.'

But the Affordable Care Act carried with it the promise of covering 'every American,' and it appears to have fallen tremendously short.

The RAND study, which has not been published – only the Los Angeles Times has seen it – found that just 23 per cent of new enrollees had no insurance before signing up.

And of those newly insured Americans, just 53 per cent have paid their first month's premiums.

If those numbers hold, the actual net gain of paid policies among Americans who lacked medical insurance in the pre-Obamacare days would be just 858,298.

President Barack Obama is scheduled to issue his own triumphant proclamation Tuesday afternoon at 4:15, less than a day after the Obamacare open enrollment period technically came to a close.

'The president will deliver a statement on the Affordable Care Act ... in the Rose Garden,' the White House announced mid-morning, providing no hint about whether Obama will take any questions from journalists.

Carney and chief of staff Denis McDonough distributed donuts to reporters in the press center on Tuesday morning – presumably without checking with the first lady – and eagerly pitched talking points to journalists writing about the milestone day.

But questions remain about the effectiveness and affordability of Obama's plan, which he sold to congressional Democrats and the American people as a scheme to cover the uninsured, and about how the law is contributing to the spiraling cost of medical care.

As information about the chasm between Obamacare's promises and its reality have reached the public, the program has become more and more unpopular – a fact that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius met with awkward silence during a Monday television interview in Oklahoma.

'At last check, 64 percent of Oklahomans aren't buying into the healthcare plan; they don't like Obamacare, and they've been pretty vocal about it,' a KWTV-9 reporter told her.

'Now that's going to be – still continue to be a tough sell, but we'll see how that plays out over the coming months.'

Sebelius, a deer trapped in TV's headlights, offered only a blank stare. Asked if she had lost the audio feed, the icy secretary responded, 'I can hear you. But I – thanks for having me.'

Hours earlier, she tooted Obama's horn during a fawning Huffington Post interview, claiming that healthcare.gov saw a surge in traffic when the president appeared on the gonzo show 'Between Two Ferns' on the Funny or Die website.

Obamacare 'definitely saw the Galifianakis bump,' she said, referring to the show's host Zach Galifianakis.

'As a mother of two 30-something sons, I know they're more likely to get their information on "Funny or Die" than they are on network TV,' she added.

Americans who missed the online broadcast still knew enough to queue up Monday for panic-induced sign-ups. Crushed with traffic, healthcare.gov crashed twice.

On its way to 7 million, the Obama administration has never answered some key questions about the open enrollment period.

The White House has instead kept to its talking points.

'What I can tell you is that we expect there to be a good mix of people who were previously uninsured who now have insurance,' Carney said Monday.

'Certainly, there’s a significant number who now have qualified for Medicaid in those states that expanded Medicaid who will have insurance who didn’t have it before.'

The midnight deadline for enrollment has become a temporary formality, as the Obama administration has offered extensions to anyone willing to claim they tried in earnest to sign up in time.

Sebelius promised Congress weeks ago that there would be no extension.

The White House has compared it to voters who are permitted to cast ballots if they are in line when the polls close. But conservative opponents note that ballot officials won't accept voters' claims the day after an election.

California has also extended its deadline through April 15.

posted 04-01-2014 06:51 PM                  

As of now, depending on each state's records, 15% to 40% of those sent their first premium notices after selecting a plan, haven't paid the premium bill. They either don't have the money,,,thought the cost was still too high,,,figure they don't get sick anyway,,,the cell phone and cable tv bill is more important to pay,,,etc etc

The projected target age range that the ObamaCare plan was shooting for to sign up before March 31st, were those in the 21 to 35 age bracket. The target number was 40% of those in that age range, yet figures now show they have only signed up to 25% of those people. Why do you think they ran tv ads with LeBron James and Jay Z touting how great ObamaCare was, and to sign up now? You didn't see Wilford Brimley doing tv ads to capture the older segment. ObamaCare is dependent upon younger people signing up, paying their premiums, to balance out the costs to support the plan.

posted 04-02-2014 08:45 AM                  

RAND: Only One-Third Of Obamacare Exchange Sign-Ups Were From The Previously Uninsured

Avik Roy, Forbes Staff

Today is March 31, 2014: in theory, the last day you can sign up for coverage under the subsidized Obamacare insurance exchanges. If you’ve been a regular reader of this space, you know that the numbers routinely paraded by the Obama administration regarding Obamacare website sign-ups don’t tell us much about the actual number of uninsured individuals who have gained coverage. A new study from the RAND Corporation indicates that only one-third of exchange sign-ups were previously uninsured.

The RAND study hasn’t yet been published, but its contents were made available to Noam Levey of the Los Angeles Times. RAND also estimates that 9 million individuals have purchased health plans directly from insurers, outside of the exchanges, but that “the vast majority of these people were previously insured.”

The RAND report appears to corroborate the work of other surveys. Earlier this month, McKinsey reported that 27 percent of those signing up for coverage on the individual market were previously uninsured.

Around 1/4 of exchange enrollees were previously uninsured

White House Announces 6 Million Obamacare 'Sign-Ups,' But Number of Uninsured Enrollees Remains A Mystery Avik RoyForbes Staff

One important finding of the McKinsey survey was that the proportion of those who had formally enrolled in coverage, by paying their first month’s premium, was considerably lower among the previously uninsured, relative to the previously insured. 86 percent of those who were previously insured who had “selected a marketplace plan” on the exchanges had paid, whereas only 53 percent of the previously uninsured had.

If you apply that math to the RAND figures, you get this: of the people who have paid their first month’s premium on the Obamacare exchanges, and are thereby enrolled in coverage, 76 percent were previously insured, and 24 percent were previously uninsured.

Two caveats. First, we know little about RAND’s survey methodology at this time; we’ll have to see the actual study to see the details of what they did. Second, we don’t know how many previously uninsured people signed up for off-exchange coverage, above and beyond the normal rate of churn that this market would traditionally see.

CBO predicted nearly all exchange enrollees would be previously uninsured

What’s important to remember is that this is not how Obamacare was supposed to work. The Congressional Budget Office, in its original estimates, predicted that the vast majority of the people eligible for subsidies on the exchanges would be previously uninsured individuals.

Instead, the vast majority are previously insured people, many of whom are getting a better deal on the exchanges because they either qualify for subsidies, or because they’re older individuals who benefit from the law’s steep rate hikes on the young.

This is a problem that may get worse over time, as the cost of plans continues to go up. In the McKinsey survey, of those who had decided not to sign up for Obamacare, the most common reason was the “affordability” of the offered plans. Indications from insurers like Aetna and WellPoint is that the premiums on the exchange will go up substantially next year.

The bottom line is this: there are a lot of numbers flying around out there about how many people are benefiting from Obamacare. A big part of the reason is political; advocates of the law want to claim that so many millions of people are dependent on the law for coverage, that it will be difficult to repeal.

I agree with them that the law will be difficult to repeal, but that’s no excuse for whitewashing the real problems with affordability and access in the Obamacare exchanges.