Gallup's new poll results are discussed here. My one concern is they discuss "newly insured" and not "net new insured."
Showing posts with label obamacare enrollment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label obamacare enrollment. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Monday, May 12, 2014
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. . . .
Monday, March 31, 2014
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.”
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Either the Obama administration is simply dishonest 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.
Saturday, March 15, 2014
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.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
“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.
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