100K sign up on federal exchange in November, administration far short of its goals

This morning Bloomberg published a new report suggesting that, during the last month, roughly 100,000 people signed up for insurance at Healthcare.gov. The good news for the administration is that this represents almost a four-fold increase from the month before, when only a little over 26,000 people registered. So, the folks in the White House should be pretty happy, right?

Well, no, not really. In order to be on pace to meet their projections, they would have needed to register close to a million by now.

After two months of software errors and delays that have threatened the success of President Barack Obama's signature health law, the administration said yesterday that it met its self-imposed deadline and the site, healthcare.gov, is working smoothly for the majority of users. The fumbled rollout forced the administration to scale back its original enrollment targets of about 800,000 for the first two months.

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Remember, the 100,000 figure only represents "people who have selected a plan." It doesn't necessarily mean that the "enrollee" actually pulled the trigger and purchased anything, so the real number is probably lower. Even if the number is correct, it's far from on-track and the state run exchanges are nowhere close to making up the difference. The bigger problem for the administration is that young people don't appear to be signing up. Multiple reports suggest that the majority of signups are older people, or people signing up for Medicaid. If young, healthy, people aren't buying into the scheme, there will be no wealth to redistribute nothing to offset increased costs and premiums will begin to skyrocket. By the Obama administration's own standards, this would render the law a failure. The WaPo's Ezra Klein reported as much in a piece called "ObamaCare won't get 7 million enrollees in 2014 -- and that's okay."

Back in July, when Sarah Kliff and I asked the White House how they defined "success" in 2014, they always defined it as a function of the mix of people in the exchanges -- the "ratio" -- rather than the number of people in the exchanges. On this, the administration was clear: More wasn't necessarily better. Twenty million enrollees would be a disaster if only 1 million of them were young and healthy. It all came down to the ratio. If 7 million people signed up for the exchanges -- as CBO predicted -- the Obama administration believed success meant ensuring about 2.7 million of them were young and healthy. If they got 10 million people to sign up, about 3.9 million had to be young and healthy. If they got 4 million to sign up, success would mean making sure 1.5 million were young and healthy.

Libs like Klein may take the Polyanna-ish view that this will "all be all right," but they have their heads buried in some very deep sand. Right now, the administration has gotten nowhere near achieving either the projected number of signups,orthe desired young/old ratio. In short, few people have signed up and the ones who have are simply contributing to ObamaCare's unsustainability. The White House is now counting on the Healthcare.gov "relaunch" to end their misery, but it's hard to believe a simple web fix (if it's really a fix at all) will change people's opinions about a widely despised law. The bottom line is: if young people aren't buying in, the whole thing is already circling the drain. Instead of closing in on success as ObamaCare's D-Day draws closer, it appears that administration goals are slipping further and further away. They'd better hope that an awful lot of people destroyed their holidays by setting up those ACA signup seminars...

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