Misstating the Rand Report

You probably heard about the Rand survey by now. This is one of those documents Democrats love – vague and with sneaky caveats which make the headline true, but misleading. Here’s what you need to know.

First, let me point out that the Rand Corporation used to be to the left what Halliburton became: the corporate boogeyman controller of the New World Military Capitalist Order (note the image attached to this article, which you can find at many leftist sites). So there is a lot of irony in the Democrats pointing happily to a Rand report, but irony is typically lost on Democrats.

Anyways, according to Team Obama, the Rand report tells us that Obamcare (1) gave 18.0 million people insurance (2) 9.3 million of those were uninsured before, and that (3) only one million lost their insurance because of Obamacare. And that’s before they even factored in the surge in enrollments at the end of March!! Take that, suckas!

Ok, let’s unpack this fudge, shall we.

First, swimming through the numbers, Rand reports that only 3.9 million people signed up for Obamacare. This number will likely go up because of the last minute surge, but it would be stunning for it to rise anywhere near Team Obama’s claim (now) of 7.5 million (unless they just accept Obama's fake data). Put simply, that’s a failure. And it's nowhere near the 18 million liberals are claiming was found in the Rand report.

Moreover, Rand estimates that only 1.4 million of those people were uninsured. The rest were simply dumped into the exchange by their employers.

The rest of the 18.0 million number comes from two sources. First, 5.9 million were added to Medicaid. Note that this is half the 9 million team Obama was claiming for the past several months. So someone has some explaining to do... if only we had a real media watchdog. Secondly, recall that this number is not “new” enrollees, this number is “new plus re-enrollees.” In other words, it’s likely that the vast majority of these people were on Medicaid already and just had their policies renewed. Basically, they are crediting Obamacare with providing insurance to people who already had it. Other studies have found that less than one million of these people were new to Medicaid.

The rest of the 18.0 million are 8.2 million people who got insurance at work. To credit Obamacare with this is laughable. This is simply a function of more people finding work... that’s it. And if we are going to credit Obamacare with this, then we need to “credit” Obamacare with the people who lost insurance since it first came up in 2009. In that regard, the number of uninsured rose from 14.4% under Bush to a high of 18% under Obama (Rand actually credits Obama with a reduction from 20.5% to 15.8%, so lets run with that). This means that Obamacare stripped 6.1% of Americans of their insurance: 18.9 million people. Hey whoa!! Where have I seen someone claim an 18 million number recently? Hmmm. It's funny how all of Obama's numbers magically add up.

Anyways, Obama cost 18.9 million people their insurance. 8.2 million found coverage through jobs. 3.9 found their way to the exchanges. And about 1 million were added to Medicaid. Thus, Obamacare cost 18.9 million people their insurance, but "got" 13.2 million their coverage. That leaves 5.7 million people forgotten.

That's not a victory. Also, think about this. Obamacare’s success can now be defined thusly: after spending trillions and disrupting millions, Obamacare has managed to bring the insurance rate almost back up to what it was under Bush.

Aim high, jackass.

Of course, that’s the same level of "success" Obama has achieved with unemployment, income growth, inflation or pretty much any other measure of economic health. So at least he's consistent.

Finally, as an aside, another study has found that the people in the Exchanges are a good deal sicker than the rest of the insured public. In particular AIDS patients and those needing specialty drugs have gone to the Exchanges. According to an Express Scripts study of 650,000 claims filed in January and February with 25 insurers, Exchange participants are four times more likely to be treating AIDS, AIDS drugs are in the top ten spending list under the Exchange but not outside the exchange, hepatitis C treatments are similar. Pain medications were 35% higher in the Exchange than in other plans, drugs to control seizures were 27% higher, antidepressants were 14% higher. All of this means “expensive!” All in all, the Exchanges are spending 47% more than private insurers on "specialty drugs," i.e. drugs used by less than 1% of the public.

What this tells us is that the Exchanges really are packed with people with long term, very expensive conditions, i.e. the uninsurables. That, combined with the low turnout, is a disaster in waiting for Obamacare.