By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--March 7, 2014
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Only one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private plans through the new health insurance marketplaces enrolled as of last month, according to a survey by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., The Washington Post reported on Thursday. The McKinsey survey found that only 27 percent of people who have selected a plan on the exchanges described themselves as having previously been without insurance. That percentage is up from 11 percent a month earlier, the report said.
The Obama administration has said 4 million people have signed up for private coverage through the insurance exchanges although it is not known how many of them had been uninsured. The administration has said 9 million people are eligible for Medicaid, a number that includes renewals. Outside experts estimate that the Medicaid eligible number may be lower, around 3.5 million.So that's what McKinsey says. What do the administration's numbers say about how many uninsured people are signing up? Um . . . what numbers?
Gary Cohen, the soon-to-be-former director of the main implementation office at the Health and Human Services Department, stopped by an insurance industry conference Thursday to offer an update on enrollment. The main points were familiar: People are signing up (about 4 million have picked a plan so far), and the administration is going all out to promote Obamacare over the last few weeks of the enrollment window. But Cohen didn't have much more to offer insurers—who need this to work just as much as the White House—on some of the biggest unknowns about the law's progress: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the health care law will reduce the number of uninsured people by about 24 million over the next few years, and that about 6 million previously uninsured people will gain coverage through the law's exchanges this year. So, is enrollment on track to meet that goal? Overall enrollment is looking pretty decent, but how many of the people who have signed up were previously uninsured? "That's not a data point that we are really collecting in any sort of systematic way," Cohen told the insurance-industry crowd on Thursday when asked how many of the roughly 4 million enrollees were previously uninsured.They have no idea. They're not even trying to find out. This entire thing is a total fiasco and the one thing they claimed it would do when they first shoved it down our throats, they're not even trying to find out if it's doing. Fox News reported yesterday that Obama's approval rating is down to 38 percent. I simply cannot believe that. What is wrong with 38 percent of America?
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