Obamacare enrollment down from 9.2 million last year to 8.7 million this year

Apparently not everyone is so thrilled by the system.  Note that this also just provides further evidence about how poorly the government is at predicting enrollment in the system.  From the Washington Times:

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services now says about 8.7 million people booked coverage on the federal website through Saturday, a drop from the roughly 8.8 million signups it reported last week, after the enrollment period officially closed on Dec. 15. 

The tally fell short of the 9.2 million who used HealthCare.gov last year, though Obamacare supporters cheered the numbers as a strong showing in the face of President Trump’s antipathy toward the law. 

Officials said the updated total for 2018 reflects the share of people who either canceled their plan selections at the last minute or dropped coverage after they were automatically enrolled for 2018. . . .

2.8% of Americans are newly insured through Obamacare exchanges, those using exchanges are slightly less healthy than average

Gallup's new poll results are discussed here.  My one concern is they discuss "newly insured" and not "net new insured."

Do you need more proof that government is inefficient?: Just 4 failed Obamacare state website exchanges cost a total of at least $474 million to set up

I don't see how it is possible to set up websites that cost so much money.  The amusing thing is they don't even know exactly how much these four websites will cost.  From Politico:

Nearly half a billion dollars in federal money has been spent developing four state Obamacare exchanges that are now in shambles — and the final price tag for salvaging them may go sharply higher. 

Each of the states — Massachusetts, Oregon, Nevada and Maryland — embraced Obamacare, and each underperformed. All have come under scathing criticism and now face months of uncertainty as they rush to rebuild their systems or transition to the federal exchange. 

The federal government is caught between writing still more exorbitant checks to give them a second chance at creating viable exchanges of their own or, for a lesser although not inexpensive sum, adding still more states to HealthCare.gov. The federal system is already serving 36 states, far more than originally anticipated. . . .

Seriously? Aetna CEO: "Only 11% Of ObamaCare Signups Have Been Uninsured"

KERNEN: “In spite of the government, you're doing OK.”SORKIN: “What is your latest read on the website, if you will.”BERTOLINI: “You know, I think too much is being made of the website. We've all had website failures from time to time, and this was a particularly big problem, but I think, really, is the program working behind the website—”SORKIN: “OK, so what about the pool?”BERTOLINI: “So right now we see that only 11 percent of the population is people that were formerly uninsured that are now insured. So we didn't really eat into the uninsured population. So, is the program working? We saw people that were very adept at shopping, so economics always works, so if I can find a cheaper policy versus the the one I already have, in the individual market, I'll go and buy that. We didn't see a whole lot of shift. As a matter of fact, employers shied away from moving their employees into public exchanges because they didn't like the way it rolled out. And so, we saw employers pull back from thinking about the public exchanges for their employees. So what we saw was a shift from the individual insured market onto the public exchanges where they could get a better deal on the subsidy.”

Stupid/Misleading government ad to encourage 25 to 34 year olds to sign up for Obamacare

Either the Obama administration is simply misleading or this is more evidence that they don't know simple math.  Of course, both things might be true.

This ad for 25 to 34-year olds implies that there is a fifty percent chance of them having to pay at least $500 in medical bills over the course of a year.  In other words, the expected medical bills over the course of a year are at least $250 (it would be more useful to simply state what the expected bills would be).  In any case, the cheapest state insurance for a 27-year old under Obamacare is $142 per month, with most in the $200 range per month (see chart below).  Could someone please explain to me how this section of the ad justifies the statement "I should really get insurance"?

Of course, the problem is even worse than this because if a young person does get hit with that $500 insurance bill, the insurance company isn't going to have to pick up the entire amount.

The reason why insurance is such a bad deal for younger people is that Obamacare is purposefully set up to transfer money from younger to older people.  Younger people pay much more than what they would pay under true market insurance rates so as to subsidize and lower the prices for older people.

Few young people signing up for Obamacare?: Democrats blame young people

Dana Milbank has an unintentionally funny piece at the Washington Post today:

. . . The administration announced last week that only 1.08 million people ages 18 to 34 had signed up for Obamacare by the end of February, or about 25 percent of total enrollees. If the proportion doesn’t improve significantly, the result likely will be fatal for the Affordable Care Act. . . . 

What went wrong? The president and his aides failed to keep his youth movement engaged. But part of the problem also is the inability of the millennial generation to remain attached to a cause. . . . 

Even if Obama had worked harder to keep his youth army engaged, it’s not entirely clear that the effort would have succeeded. As a group, the generation’s attachment is fickle. . . . 

The millennials are at least as passionate as earlier generations and more entrepreneurial, but they lack ties to institutions — unions, political parties, churches — because of their online existence. . . .

I have a simpler explanation: Obamacare dramatically raised insurance costs for young people, using them to subsidize older people buying insurance.  Young people were already paying too high premiums as a result of state regulations, and Obama merely made that problem much worse.  Why should the rate that people buy insurance go up when you are asking them to buy unfair insurance?  

More from The Hill newspaper:

The administration is engaged in an all-out push to increase young people’s enrollment in ObamaCare with just two weeks left before the deadline to acquire insurance. 

Young people have signed up at a significantly lower rate than the administration had hoped, raising fears among Affordable Care Act advocates.   

The fewer young and healthy people sign up, the higher premiums are likely to rise for older people for whom insurance is more of a necessity. . . . 

But even so, the need for young enrollees is acute, and it is forcing President Obama to try to reconnect with an important part of his base. He won 60 percent of the youth vote in 2012, but that support is not easily translating into enrollment. . . .

The reason why insurance premiums for older people will rise if not more young people sign up is simple: you won't have enough young people to pay more than their costs to subsidize the older people. 

Obamacare: As of February 1st only about 472,000 who had signed up were previously uninsured

“Bob, let’s look at the bottom line. The bottom line is this: 10 million Americans have health insurance today who would not have had it without the Affordable Care Act. Ten million.” – Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Feb. 9, 2014

Six million Americans have gotten covered. Have you?http://t.co/9v9Gs3H0hgpic.twitter.com/KOWEd1SR6E

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) January 10, 2014

These claims were already obviously false and that has been pointed out.  But something was missed in the previous critiques: how many of those enrolled were previously ensured.

According to this survey done by McKinsey, only about 10.6 percent of those who enrolled in Obamacare were previously uninsured.  But only just over half of these paid their premium.  That implies only 472,000 people who have enrolled and paid their premium.  Even if you assume all those who have enrolled will eventually pay and be insured, that will only get you to about 900,000.

More Obamacare problems: funny enrollment numbers and the cost of getting people enrolled

From Fox News:

The Obama administration’s latest rosy scenario about 3.3 million consumers signing up for health care plans is facing skepticism from top insurance industry officials, who estimate that somewhere in the range of 10 to 25 percent of those “enrollees” actually have not yet paid their premiums and are not fully enrolled 

“The numbers are not as high as 3.3 million -- it’s lower,” one senior insurance industry source told Fox News. “Those numbers are inflated. The question is how much.” 

Industry officials tell Fox that some insurance companies have privately reported up to 30 percent of enrollees have not paid up, while other companies believe a higher percentage of customers have taken care of their premiums. The senior insurance industry source suggested it averages out to roughly 10 to 25 percent of enrollees not yet paying into the system, and thus those individuals do not really have insurance. . . .

This would imply that instead of 3.3 million, the number would be 2.48 to 2.97 million.  It also appears that the costs of the getting people enrolled have been pretty large, though the numbers that I have seen have some problems -- particularly in that they include development costs for the website that will be useful for many years, not just one.  From Investors' Business Daily:

How much does it cost taxpayers to sign up one ObamaCare enrollee? In President Obama's home state of Hawaii, it's $56,819. 

The Obama administration gave Hawaii $205 million in grants over the past three years to set up its state-run exchange. But so far, only 3,614 Hawaiians have filled out applications — just 40% of the state's enrollment goal. 

Even if Hawaii were to reach its 9,000 target, it would still cost nearly $23,000 for each enrollee. 

Hawaii's low sign-up numbers have state officials scrambling to figure out what to do next year, when its exchange is supposed to rely on excise taxes charged to insurers selling through the Hawaii Health Connector. 

Washington, D.C., meanwhile, received $133.6 million in federal grants to build its exchange, but so far has signed up just 5,090 — for a per-enrollee cost of $26,242.
Ironically, the city where Obama signed ObamaCare into law is just 12% toward its enrollment goal, the second worst rate in the country. . . .

Obama now getting pressure from Democrats to fire Kathleen Sebelius

Obama has refused on numerous occasions to agree to fire HHS Secretary Sebelius.  From Obama's February 2, 2014 interview with Bill O'Reilly:

OBAMA:  -- as I said, I don't think anybody anticipated the degree of problems that you had on HealthCare.gov.  The good news is that right away, we decided how are we going to fix it, it got fixed within a month and a half, it was up and running and now it's working the way it's supposed to and we've signed up three million people.O'REILLY:  I don't know about that, because last week, there was an Associated Press call of people who actually went to the Web site and only 8 percent of them feel that it's working well, working well.Why didn't you fire Sebelius, the secretary in charge of this...OBAMA:  (INAUDIBLE).

O'REILLY:  -- because I mean she had to know, after all those years and all that money, that it wasn't going to work?
OBAMA:  You know, my main priority right now is making sure that it delivers for the American people.  And what we...
O'REILLY:  You're not going to answer that?
OBAMA:  -- what -- what we've ended up doing is we've got three million people signed up so far.  We're about a month behind of where we anticipated we wanted to be.  We've got over six million people who have signed up for Medicaid.
O'REILLY:  Yes.
OBAMA:  We've got three million young people under the age of 26 who have signed up on their parents' plan.  And so what we're constantly figuring out is how do we continue to improve it, how do we make sure that the folks who don't have health insurance can get health insurance...
O'REILLY:  OK...
OBAMA:  -- and those who are underinsured are able to get better health insurance.
O'REILLY:  I'm sure -- I'm sure that the intent is noble, but I'm a taxpayer.
OBAMA:  Yes.
O'REILLY:  And I'm paying Kathleen Sebelius' salary and she screwed up.
OBAMA:  Yes.
O'REILLY:  And you're not holding her accountable.
OBAMA:  Yes, well, I -- I promise you that we hold everybody up and down the line accountable.  But when we're...
O'REILLY:  But she's still there.
OBAMA:  -- when we're in midstream, Bill, we want to make sure that our main focus is how do we make this thing work so that people are able to sign up?
And that's what we've done.
O'REILLY:  All right. . . .

Just in November, Obama declared that he thought she was doing a great job.

"I think Kathleen Sebelius, under tremendously difficult circumstances over the last 4½ years, has done a great job in setting up the insurance markets so that there is a good product out there for people to get," Obama said. . . . 

 Even when Democrats are calling for someone to be fired over the debacle of Obamacare, Obama is defending her.

 Mr. Obama hosted a private meeting at the White House for House Democrats. Both sides afterward described the session as productive and friendly. But Rep. Carol Shea-Porter(D., N.H.) told Mr. Obama at one point that some people should have left their jobs over the flawed rollout of the health-care law that is the centerpiece of his domestic legacy.

“Some people should tender their resignations,” Ms. Shea-Porter told the president,  officials in the meeting said. An aide to the congresswoman confirmed the comment.
Mr. Obama has resisted firing people over the troubled launch of the health-care website last fall. In an interview with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly on Sunday, Mr. Obama was asked why he hadn’t fired Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
“My main priority right now is making sure that it delivers for the American people,” he said of the health-care law.

More evidence that Obamacare won't reduce the number of uninsured

"Robert Wood Johnson Foundation finds less than 40 percent of uninsured adults will obtain coverage in 2014."  

Saying only 39 percent of those who are uninsured will get insurance isn't very good news, but the numbers are even much worse than that.  This number is extremely misleading in that there is a large flow in and out of uninsured each year.  The government's survey of uninsured is just for people at one point of the year (March).  Many of these people are uninsured while they are switching jobs.  The bottom line is that the 40 percent number is pretty meaningless as a measure of how things are improving unless you take into account the normal turnover and that turnover is around 40 percent.

Will Obamacare destroy the health insurance industry?: Was this the plan all along?

My own guess is that this disaster is from hubris and incompetence.  Democrats simply thought that they knew better how to run industries than the people who have their money on the line would know.  Moody's is also concerned about The Hill calls the "string of unilateral changes and delays" in how the Obama administration is administering the law.  From The Hill newspaper:

Moody’s announced Thursday it was downgrading its outlook for health insurers from stable to negative based on uncertainty related to ObamaCare.
The credit rating agency cited an unstable environment because of the healthcare law’s difficult rollout . . . .
“While we’ve had industry risks from regulatory changes on our radar for a while, the ongoing unstable and evolving environment is a key factor for our outlook change,” Moody’s Senior Vice President Stephen Zaharuk said in a statement. “The past few months have seen new regulations and announcements that impose operational changes well after product and pricing decisions were finalized.”
The Moody’s report also cites the slow enrollment of young people into ObamaCare as a reason for the downgrade.
“Uncertainty over the demographics of those enrolling in individual products through the exchanges is a key factor in Moody’s outlook change,” the ratings agency said.
Citing statistics released by the administration, it noted that so far about 24 percent of enrollees are between the ages of 18 and 34, while a target of 40 percent may be necessary to keep premiums from rising in the future.
It said the 24 percent of young people enrolled so far is “well short” of the 40 percent target. . . .

Obama administration reveals it worries that Obama risks pushing insurance companies into "default and disrupting continued services and coverage to consumers"

While the Obama administration is publicly saying everything is fine with Obamacare, privately their story is quite different.  From Fox News:

To justify a no-bid contract with Accenture after firing CGI as the lead contractor, the administration released documents from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services that offered a rare glimpse of its worst fears, saying the problems with the website puts "the entire health insurance industry at risk" ... "potentially leading to their default and disrupting continued services and coverage to consumers." 

Then it went even further, saying if the problems were not fixed by mid-March, "they will result in financial harm to the government." 

It even added that without the fixes "the entire health care reform program is jeopardized." 

In spite of the "urgent" need officials cited to keep the system from collapsing, the White House spokesman said he knew nothing about it. 

“I didn't see the article I'm not aware of those statements,” Jay Carney said. . . .

So here is the big question, why isn't the rest of the mainstream media reporting on this?  The Hill newspaper first reported this.

More fallout from Obamacare: Target Corp drops part-time employees from its healthcare plan

From The Hill newspaper:

Target Corp. announced on Tuesday it would no longer offer healthcare coverage to its part-time employees. 

In a blog post on the company’s website, Jodee Kozlak, the executive vice president of human resources, framed it as a positive development for part-time employees of the company. 

“The Health Insurance Marketplaces provides new options for healthcare coverage that we believe our part-time members may prefer,” she wrote. “In fact, by offering them insurance, we could actually disqualify many of them from being eligible for newly available subsidies that could reduce their overall health insurance expense.” . . . 

“Our decision to discontinue this benefit comes after careful consideration of the impact to our stores’ part-time team members and to Target, the new options available for our part-time team, and the historically low number of team members who elected to enroll in the part-time plan,” Kozlak continued. . . .  

Still, the announcement could reignite criticism over President Obama’s pledge that if you like your plan, you can keep it. . . . 

Look who the few people getting health insurance through Obamacare are!: Obamacare picking up the tab for prison inmates

This last week has shown real errors in Obamacare enrollment numbers.  The Obama administration claims that 1.9 million people enrolled in October or November in states due to expanded Medicaid coverage, but actual Medicaid enrollment due directly to the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid was probably only about 190,000.  The difference is that the Obama administration claimed people who were normally enrolling in Medicaid were counted in the Obama total.  Even Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post has this headline: "Warning: Ignore claims that 3.9 million people signed up for Medicaid because of Obamacare."

From OregonLive:

Multnomah County officials expect national health care reform to cut the county's medical bills, too. 

By enrolling jail inmates in nationally subsidized healthcare -- best known as "Obamacare" to both the President and his critics -- the county could bill the federal government for the cost of providing some of them medical care. 

County health department officials briefed Multnomah County commissioners on the issue this week. . . .

The National Association of Counties is pushing other counties to adopt this policy as a way to shift their costs onto the federal government.

The ACA’s significant expansion of health insurancecoverage has many important implications for counties, as county governmentsprovide the local health care safety net infrastructure, public health functionsand other health care services, as well as often govern, finance and operate localcoverage and enrollment programs.  Counties also run and finance local jails, which are responsible for providing health care coverage for the approximately 13 million individuals who are booked into these facilities each year. . . .

There is a specific ACA provision related to the exchanges that could significantly impact county jails, which states that “an individual shall not be treated as a qualified individual, if at the time of enrollment; the individual is incarcerated, other than incarceration pending disposition of charges.”  This provision will likely allow eligible individuals in custody pending disposition of charges to enroll in a health insurance plan offered through an exchange prior to conviction, or maintain coverage if they are already enrolled. . . .  Additionally, as counties are responsible for providing health care services for county jail inmates and the overwhelming majority of individuals in jails lack any type of health insurance coverage, this provision could potentially reduce county jail health costs. . . . 

While federal law does not allow for the reimbursement of  inmate medical care under Medicaid, there is an important exception to this rule.  Specifically, the exception states that federal financial participation (FFP) is permitted “during that part of the month in which the individual is not an inmate of  a public institution.” 1 The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has verified through guidance letters issued in 1997 and 1998 that this exception applies to incarcerated individuals once they are admitted as an inpatient in a hospital, nursing facility, juvenile psychiatric facility or intermediate care facility that is not part of the state or local correctional system.   Therefore, if an inmate is eligible for Medicaid and is  transported out of a correctional facility to receive inpatient  hospital services, Medicaid can be billed to cover the cost of these services. . . . 

Thus counties are not just being advised on how to get the federal government to pick up the tab for their healthcare costs, but they are also being encouraged to handle any health care costs in what in many ways could be more costly than if the county jail took care of them itself.

Here is a note from the Association of County Commissions in Alabama.

. . . Some national groups would like to see local county jails be enrollment centers for a new population that will become eligible for Medicaid benefits.  While some county jails across the country have enrolled individuals leaving custody of the county jail as part of a re-entry program, it is not a requirement. 

Also, for these individuals to be eligible for enrollment for Medicaid benefits while they are incarcerated, they cannot be convicted of a crime or sentenced and awaiting transfer to state prison.  They must be pre-trial inmates. 

These questions arise because the ACA will expand eligibility Medicaid benefits to individuals that are up to 65 years of age and are living at 133 percent of the federal poverty level.  Individuals in this group of people may find themselves entering into the criminal justice system through the local county jail.  While this group of people may be eligible for or enrolled in Medicaid, Medicaid will not pay for any medical treatment while the individual is incarcerated. . . .

Total enrollments may be some place about 200,000 to 300,000 versus the 3.9 million.  If the national number of people in jail over the course of a year is 13 million and a quarter of the year is 3.25 million (October, November, and December), you need just a trivial percentage of them (between 6.2 and 9.2 percent) to sign up to cover the entire 200,000 to 300,000.

So how big are the enrollment changes from prison and jail in the past de-enrolling people from Medicaid.

The survey, published online today in the American Journal of Public Health, evaluated Medicaid policies from December 2011 to August 2012 at 42 state prison systems. According to the results, 66.7% of the prisons terminated enrollment and 21.4% suspended inmates from Medicaid when they were incarcerated. However, two-thirds of these prisons also helped prisoners reenroll when they were discharged. . . . 

Rich and his colleagues questioned the policies to terminate coverage during incarceration as ACA provisions roll out. States with expanded Medicaid programs will cover all adults, regardless of whether they’re disabled or have dependents, up to 138% of the federal poverty level. Broader eligibility means more prisoners likely will be covered. But if their coverage is terminated, prisons can’t benefit from a 1997 federal law that allows Medicaid to cover inpatient care that inmates receive outside of the prison system, as long as they’re Medicaid eligible. . . .

So what happens if other prisons and jails across the country have done the same thing?  In 2012, there were 745,000 people in county jails and 1,484,000 in prisons.  If just 13 percent of people in jail or prison get enrolled in Obamacare, that would give you 300,000.  Even if just 5 percent are enrolled, would be 111,420 or more than a third of the top 300,000 estimate.

Why does the media trust the Obamacare numbers put out by the Obama administration?

After first refusing to release Obamacare enrollment numbers when the Obama administration knew how bad they were and then dramatically inflating the numbers by counting people as signed up when they haven't paid for the plans (see also here), the media still reports the Obama numbers without any qualifiers.  From Fox News:

The Obama administration announced early Sunday that enrollment in the federal healthcare exchange passed the 1 million mark in December as more than 975,000 people signed up between December 1 and the December 24 deadline to ensure coverage beginning on the first of 2014.  

Officially, the administration put the total of people now enrolled at more than 1.1 million people now enrolled and boasted that the site was able to support 83,000 concurrent visitors on December 23, the next-to-last day before the sign-up deadline. By contrast, the administration reported only 27,000 sign-ups in October --the website's first, error-prone month -- and 137,000 in November. 

The administration has yet to provide a December update on the 14 states running their own exchanges. While California, New York, Washington, Kentucky and Connecticut have performed well, others are still struggling. 

The windfall comes at a critical moment for Obama's sweeping health care law, which becomes "real" for many Americans on Jan. 1 when coverage through the exchanges and key patient protections kick in. . . . .  

The fledgling exchanges are still likely to fall short of the government's own targets for 2013.  The administration had projected more than 3.3 million overall would be enrolled through federal and state exchanges by the end of the year. . . .

On December 27th, Obamacare applicants in Iowa told that they must reapply

From Des Moines Register has this:

Nearly 16,000 Iowans who tried to apply for insurance via the trouble-plagued federal health-insurance website are being told to apply separately through the state Department of Human Services. 

The news affects people who entered their information into healthcare.gov and received a notice that they might qualify for Medicaid. The federal computer system was supposed to transfer their applications to a state computer system, but that transfer has been delayed by technical problems. The new coverage is supposed to take effect Wednesday. 

“Currently, the files sent by (federal officials) do not include enough information for the state to process applications,” a Department of Human Services press release said this afternoon. “Federal officials had indicated they would send more complete information by Monday, Dec. 30, but notified DHS this afternoon that there will be additional delay.” . . .

 Any bets about whether these people will have have a chance to get their insurance up by January 1st?  Of course, the Obama administration just assumes that the private insurance companies will make up for their failures.  Yet, during December the Obama administration had a lot of time to try to gin up support for the program.

Administration officials developed the strategy in mid-December at a White House meeting with aides to House and Senate Democrats, who were part of communications “strike teams” created after HealthCare.gov relaunched Dec. 1. And since then, they’ve been working with outside groups to collect experiences with the Affordable Care Act. 

“We just naturally come across these stories every day,” said Justin Nisly, spokesman for Enroll America, which has 14,000 volunteers who have contacted more than 410,000 people. “Many of our volunteers are people who have gotten covered,” and anecdotes are a way to “make this really practical for people to get beyond the politics of it.” 

House Democratic leaders sent a three-page guide to members this week on finding stories and pitching them to local TV stations and newspapers, promoting them on Facebook and Twitter, integrating them into talking points, and highlighting them in floor speeches. 

There was one key precaution: the stories need to be “thoroughly vetted.” . . .

Obamacare is producing unaffordable health insurance in more than 50 percent of the counties in 34 states

Obamacare means that more than 50 percent of the counties in 34 states don't have affordable health insurance plans, meaning that they cost more than 8% of household income -- even the least expensive bronze plans.  The prices are going up a lot.  Some are getting at least some subsidy ($47,780 for an individual or $61,496 for a couple), but for those who don't get a subsidy those higher prices may mean a lot stop getting insurance.  Some high population counties face real problems (Bergen County, N.J., and Philadelphia and Milwaukee counties).  From USA Today:

. . . The number of people who earn close to the subsidy cutoff and are priced out of affordable coverage may be a small slice of the estimated 4.4 million people buying their own insurance and ineligible for subsidies. But the analysis clearly shows how the sticker shock hitting many in the middle class, including the self-employed and early retirees, isn't just a perception problem. The lack of counties with affordable plans means many middle-class people will either opt out of insurance or pay too much to buy it.

The prices of exchange plans have shocked many shoppers, especially those who had plans canceled because they did not meet the ACA coverage requirements. But experts are not surprised.

"The ACA was not designed to reduce costs or, the law's name notwithstanding, to make health insurance coverage affordable for the vast majority of Americans," says health care consultant Kip Piper, a former government and insurance industry official. "The law uses taxpayer dollars to lower costs for the low-income uninsured but it also increases costs overall and shifts costs within the marketplace." . . .

Obama unilaterally rewrites the Obamacare law yet again, delaying sign up date: Why is it that Obama keeps expecting private insurance companies to fix his mistakes

What would Obama's reaction be if private companies ever wanted more time?  He would probably attack them.  Originally, the deadline for individuals to be covered by January 1st was December 15th, then December 23rd and now December 31st.  Not only are there real problems with the data being given to the insurance companies, but now the Obama administration is giving the companies absolutely no time to double check that information and no time to even make sense that people have paid for their policies.  If you buy insurance at 11:59:59 PM on December 31st, Obama wants the insurance companies liable for the bills that you accrue at 12:00:01 AM on January 1st.  From Fox Business:

Another Obamacare deadline was pushed back on Thursday and now the White House is asking insurers to accept late payments and still give individuals coverage in the interim. 

The Department of Health and Human Services extended the deadline for individuals who want to be covered on the first of the year to Dec. 31 from Dec. 23. 

HHS is asking insurers to accept payments through this extended date and give consumers additional time to pay their first month’s premium while still offering coverage starting on Jan. 1. . . .

Biased media coverage on Obamacare signups, covering up how few people are actually signed up

The media keeps uncritically reporting the information provided to it by the Obama administration.  CNN has this figure.  364,682 people "signed up" is not a lot, but the numbers are even worse than that.

The problem is that the number of people who have actually paid their initial premium is just a small fraction of that.  They should have also included a fourth circle with 18,000 to 55,000 who have completely signed up for coverage.  From Healthy buzz:

That’s slow going, according to consultants and some insurers, raising the prospect that actual enrollment will be far lower than the figures HHS is releasing. 

“There is also a lot of worrying going on over people making payments,” industry consultant Robert Laszewski wrote in an email. “One client reports only 15% have paid so far. It is still too early to know for sure what this means but we should expect some enrollment slippage come the payment due date.” 

Another consultant Kip Piper, agreed. “So far I’m hearing from health plans that around 5% and 10% of consumers who have made it through the data transfer gauntlet have paid first month’s premium and therefore truly enrolled,” he wrote me. . . . 

Blue Shield of California said it has sent out thousands of payment request letters. “Members do not know they need to make their first month’s payment until they get this letter. Payments are trickling in and while we expect an uptick over the next week, members have until January 6 to make this payment,” spokeswoman Mia Campitelli wrote in an email. . . .

Unfortunately, it looks like all the mainstream media coverage is leaving this information out.

UPDATE: Sebelius' testimony from today.  Now do you believe that they didn't track this information?  If not, why not?

CBS News has a devastating discussion on small businesses dropping insurance because of how Obamacare is increasing insurance prices

In this piece Sharyl Attkisson notes how the Obama administration knew that small business employees would lose their health insurance because of Obamacare (of course, many large businesses will also be dropping coverage).  Obviously a lot more than the 5 million the administration has recently conceded would be effected.  In 2010, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimated Obamacare would "collectively reduce the number of people with employer-sponsored health coverage by about 14 million." Most devastatingly, CBS News reports on two small business owners who are cancelling their worker's insurance because they say they can no longer afford it.