Obamacare: Epic Failure Continues

If it's Monday, it must be Obamacare disclosure day. Ug. On the one hand, these Obamacare updates need to stop. They’re killing me. On the other hand, they are kind of funny in a train wreck sort of way, and this is information you should know. So let’s get to it and then we’ll never talk of this again.

The Wall Street Journal has done an interesting analysis of Obamacare. They wanted to know if Obama was being even close to truthful in the numbers he’s spewed forth about Obamacare. He hasn’t. Surprise! Here are their fascinating findings:

● Two different industry groups have conducted surveys to see what percentage of the two million people who “bought” Obamacare policies were previously without insurance and how many were simply dumped into the system when Obama killed their prior policies. Depending on the survey, 11%, 25% or 35% of the enrollees were uninsured before. Thus, if Obama’s goal is to get new people covered, then he's only succeeded with somewhere between 242,000 and 770,000 people... the rest simply replaced existing insurance.

● 242,000 is far less than the goal of 7 million at this point. Even using the bigger number (770k) still means he's only hit 11% of his goal. Moreover, only a fraction of those have actually paid... and they don’t have insurance until they pay.

● Of those who didn’t sign up, 52% said they couldn’t afford Obamacare. 30% said they couldn’t work their way through the system.

● Of those who had pre-existing insurance, around 10% were dumped into the Exchanges by heartless employers, the rest were forced into the Exchanges when heartless (and brainless) Obama made their prior plans illegal.

The Journal also examined Medicaid enrollments and found that Team Obama is lying through their teeth about those. Team Obama claims that 4 million people have signed up for Medicaid because of Obamacare. But...

But people sign up for and drop out of Medicaid all the time, and you can't just attribute them all to Obamacare. To figure out the real story, Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics compared the enrollments in states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare and to those that didn’t. What he found was that 55% of the enrollments in Medicaid took place in states that did not expand their coverage as Obama wanted. Hence, those people signing up was not the result of Obamacare as they were already eligible under the old system. Then he went back and looked at prior enrollment trends in the other states and found the normal baseline enrollment before Obamacare. Comparing that baseline to the post-Obamacare sign ups, he found that Obamacare added only 190,000 people to Medicaid.

The liberal Washington Post examined Trende’s analysis and concluded that he was right. They then labeled Obama’s four million claim “ridiculous” and gave three Pinocchios to everyone “who had improperly used the administration's figure or left the wrong impression about it.” You know things are bad when liberals are accusing Obama of lying.

Anyway, with 10 weeks to go in their enrollment period, and the CBO estimating that 14 million people should sign up for 2014, Team Obama is behind the eight ball. So far, they’ve only achieved 6.8% of their goal with no reason to think they’ll do much better in the future.

... and that needs to be balanced against the 5 million who lost their insurance and the 100+ million who saw their premiums soar.

Epic fail.