Obamacare is an abysmal failure by its own standard
Posted by Richard on March 27, 2014
The raison d’être for Obamacare is to provide health insurance coverage for the 30 million to 50 million people (depending on whose wild-ass guess you believe) uninsured. How’s it doing so far?
The Obama administration and its media shills have been crowing that 5 million people have “enrolled” for Obamacare on the state and federal exchanges. When asked how many of those have actually paid the first month’s premium, they claim they don’t know, although their own rules require insurance companies to report that information monthly. Estimates of the number of “enrollees” who haven’t actually completed the process by paying their premiums range from 20% to 25%.
So let’s do a little math. Assuming 20% of the 5 million “enrollees” haven’t paid brings the number covered down to 4 million. According to the management consulting firm McKinsey, as of the end of February, 27% of the “enrollees” were previously uninsured, but they were even less likely to have paid their premiums than the previously insured. McKinsey’s number crunching arrives at an estimate that only 14% of those actually now covered were previously uninsured.
But let’s be generous and assume that more of them have paid premiums since February. Heck, let’s be real generous and assume that a full 25% of the 4 million were previously uninsured. That’s 1.25 million.
Divide 1.25 million by 50 million or by 30 million, and you discover that Obamacare has covered somewhere between 2.5% and 4% of the previously uninsured. Epic fail.
And to achieve that underwhelming result, it’s cost millions of the previously insured their insurance plan of choice, forced millions more to pay higher premiums, and resulted in probably tens of millions having a smaller provider network that may not include their doctor or hospital of choice. Not to mention saddling insurance companies with a process so screwed up that, if it isn’t fixed soon, many (most?) may just stop offering individual (and probably small group) health insurance entirely.
One could be forgiven for suspecting that the real purpose of Obamacare all along was to destroy the private health insurance market in order to replace it with a British-style, government-run, single-payer socialist system. After all, one of the architects of this abysmal failure has said as much.
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