Many Americans bore a sneaking suspicion that a significant percentage of people who partook of Obamacare insurance policies were responding to demands for payments by exclaiming, “Who, me?” It does seem intuitively obvious this would happen. After all, poor people receive Medicaid benefits, elderly people receive Medicare benefits, and working people have their insurance payments deducted from their pay. They never actually see that money, so they don’t have the sensation of paying for their insurance. That covers a lot of Americans. One way or another, most of us are accustomed to NOT paying for insurance; at least, not directly, out of pocket or with a check.
Here’s the report from the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Money quote:
(A)s 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.
Elements of the liberal news media were quick to dismiss this report as containing a strong Republican bias. Here’s an example, from The Atlantic. Money quote, again:
The Obama administration told congressional Republicans to ask insurers who paid for insurance, so they did. The result was the House Energy and Commerce committee’s incomplete and misleading survey, which found that 67 percent of Obamacare enrollees have paid premiums. It’s inaccurate, but also the best data we have.
So why was it incomplete and inaccurate? Because the report’s cutoff date was April 15, and many insurance clients weren’t required to make their first payments until after that date. Also, the report only counts people insured through the federal program; Connecticut and many other states have their own enrollment systems.
Despite its skepticism over the GOP’s numbers, the Atlantic report expresses exasperation with the Obama administration:
Transparency is the key issue here. The GOP report isn’t necessarily informative, but it does prove that it’s not impossible for HHS to ask the insurers to tell them who has paid as they wait for their back-end system — which would help communication between the administration and insurers — to work. Until the administration releases their own official numbers, the GOP’s incomplete survey is the best data we have. In the absence of the official data, we’re living with the GOP’s facts.
My take? The reality isn’t quite as bad as the Republicans make it out to be, but it’s bad enough for the Obama administration and leading Democrats to continue obfuscating.
