More Interesting Obamacare Numbers

With Bev trapped in a world without Commentarama Access, I thought I’d share some interesting Obamacare numbers with you. The left has been screaming that Obamacare is working, and they point to various numbers to prove it. But there is something wrong with the numbers they use.

The first claim the left loves is that Obamacare has slowed the rate of growth of medical costs. In other words, while it’s still getting more expensive, it’s not getting as expensive as fast as it has been. As a result, Obamacare will cost 20% less than expected over its first five years.

Here’s the thing...

Obamacare will be cheaper, but not because it caused costs to go down. Instead, it will be cheaper because fewer people are enrolling. When created, the CBO expected 13 million would be signed up by the end of this year. They have since lowered their estimate to 12 million. Moreover, the real number is likely to be around 9 million. Nine million is 30% less than estimated. Thus, while Obamacare may be 20% cheaper, getting the reduction has been the result of cutting the number of participants by 30%. That’s nothing to brag about. Moreover, you would think that a 30% reduction in participants should lead at least to a 30% cut in costs, not a 20% cut. So any bragging about cost cuts is completely misleading the public.

A corollary claim to this is that by cutting costs, Obamacare has made Medicare cheaper as well. But that claim causes the same problem: the Medicare cuts are not the result of cost savings, they are the result of Obama simply removing those moneys from the Medicare program, i.e. rationing.

At the same time the left brags about the cost of Obamacare going down, they also like to claim that Obamacare is signing up more people than expected. But this is misleading. When the law was passed, the Democratic-controlled CBO estimated that 13 million would sign up by the end of 2014. By 2015, the number is supposed to rise to 21 million. But we aren’t even close to those numbers. Instead, Team Obama has revise the number down to nine million and now pats themselves on the back for meeting that lowered goal. Pathetic. That’s 43% of the initial estimate.

At other times, they combine Medicare/Medicaid signups, even though those people are counted separately under the CBO estimates.

What’s more, they now estimate that ultimately 31 million people will remain uninsured despite the program. But if that’s the case, then why did we do this? And how can the program be considered a success when it only reached 37% of the people it was designed to reach?

You tell me.