One of the Obama Administration's major defenses of ObamaCare has been to claim that it's hitting its target numbers in terms of enrollment. Granted, its target numbers are not very impressive when you consider ObamaCare was supposedly passed to address the "problem" of 43 million people without health insurance.
But no matter. They said they needed 7 million and they supposedly got more than 8 million, even though they had a tendency to count people who had only created a profile and hadn't necessarily paid a premium.
Turns out now that even that was too generous an accounting. They overcounted the total by 400,000 people, thanks to a screw-up uncovered by Darrell Issa's House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The already-dwindled total of 7.1 million is now down to just 6.7 million, which means that after all the victory laps over supposedly surpassing their announced threshold for viability. . . they didn't:
Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell called the latest lapse "unacceptable."
"The mistake we made is unacceptable," Burwell said on Twitter. "I will be communicating that clearly throughout the (department.)"
Administration spokesman Aaron Albright said that the overcount involved about 400,000 people.
Those consumers have separate dental coverage in addition to a medical plan, and were double-counted by mistake, said Albright. They had purchased both the medical and dental plans through HealthCare.gov and state insurance markets created under the law.
Since you know the left will try to insist this is not that big a deal, let's understand why that isn't true. First, we have a simple matter of credibility here. If the number of enrollees is crucial to the viability of the law, and the administration can't be trusted to count it or report it correctly, then how can any of us have confidence in their inevitable claims that "the law is working"?
But here's a potentially bigger problem: Insurance companies determine premiums and their own costs in large part by looking at the size of the risk pool they're insuring. In this context, the difference between 7.1 million and 6.7 million is very significant. Maybe the private insurers have a clearer picture than the White House of their own individual enrollment. But the fact remains that if you can't count your enrollment accurately, you don't even really know your own costs and you can't determine premiums or budgets accurately.
For all the left's criticisms of the insurance market - and I've got plenty of my own - how do they make the case that government can run this racket better when they can't even count how many people they've signed up?
By the way, was this really an "error" as Burwell now claims? Or was it done intentionally, only to be discovered by Issa's committee and then claimed as an error? We may never know, but given the inclinations of the Obama Administration - especially when it comes to their rationalizations for ObamaCare - I guess you can draw your own conclusions.
I'm certainly drawing mine.
