| | | No wonder they want to delay it 3 years. Nobody wants it , even if free. (nobody can make this crap up..not even kenny)
Byron York: Number of Obamacare sign-ups is greatly inflated
But there is strong new evidence to suggest the administration's claims are grossly exaggerated and deeply misleading. Obamacare is not doing nearly as well as the president wants you to believe.
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First, Medicaid. This week, the health consulting firm Avalere found that only 1 to 2 million of the 6.3 million who signed up for Medicaid were new enrollees brought into the program by Obamacare. The rest were people who were eligible and would have signed up for Medicaid irrespective of Obamacare, in addition to people who were already on Medicaid but were renewing their status. (The researchers reached their conclusion by comparing the Obamacare sign-ups with a recent period before the new health law went into effect.)
If the Avalere report is accurate — and experts are taking it seriously — then less than one-third, and perhaps less than one-quarter, of the new Medicaid sign-ups cited by the administration were previously uninsured people gaining coverage because of Obamacare. That's a major shortfall.
The numbers are important not only for policy, but for politics. In recent months, as the failures of the Obamacare website left the administration reeling and its supporters disheartened, Democrats often pointed to the number of Medicaid sign-ups as an example — the only example — of a shining success for Obamacare. Now that success looks a lot less shiny.
"It's a surprise because of all the outreach and the fact that Medicaid is free — there is no premium paid by individuals," said health care analyst Bob Laszewski. "This really is perplexing — they can't give it away!"
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A McKinsey and Co. survey cited by the Journal found that just 11 percent of private insurance signups were people who previously had no coverage. Other surveys found that about one-quarter of new sign-ups were previously uninsured.
Whatever the precise number, it appears that a large majority of the activity in Obamacare private coverage sign-ups is essentially a churn operation: The system throws people out of their coverage, and then those people come to the system to sign up for new coverage, and that is reported as a gain for Obamacare.
Put the two together — Medicaid and private insurance — and it's clear the response of the nation's uninsured to Obamacare has been far less enthusiastic than the administration claims. Which means that the Affordable Care Act has gotten off to a terrible start at its core mission, insuring the uninsured.
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