Obamacare Poster Boy Chad Henderson Hasn't Signed up for Obamacare...Says His Father?

That’s what Reason’s Peter Suderman is saying, after writing up “an exclusive Reason.com interview with Bill Henderson:”

Chad Henderson is the media’s poster boy for Obamacare. Reporters struggled this week to find individuals who said they had been able to enroll in one of the law’s 36 federally run health-insurance exchanges.

That changed yesterday, when they found Henderson, a 21-year-old student and part-time child-care worker who lives in Georgia and says that he successfully enrolled himself and his father Bill in insurance plans via the online exchange administered at healthcare.gov.

But in an exclusive phone interview this morning with Reason, Chad’s father Bill contradicted virtually every major detail of the story the media can’t get enough of. What’s more, some of the details that Chad has released are also at odds with published rate schedules and how Obamacare officials say the enrollment system works.

Read the whole thing, and then recall Chad’s 15 minutes of fame yesterday:

Despite a huge number of reports of technical failures that kept people from creating accounts at HealthCare.gov the last three days, Mediaite notes that one lucky winner of the health insurance exchange lottery was Chad Henderson, who was interviewed about that miraculous development by virtually every media outlet in America. As he wrote on Facebook:

I’ve now been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post,Chattanooga Times Free Press, The Huffington Post, Enroll America, and POLITICO!! Those stories will be published in the coming days. I have a press conference call with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services later tonight. Also, local folks….. my interview with Kimberly Barbour WRCB-TV will be aired TONIGHT at 5:30pm on WRCB Channel 3 Eyewitness News so be sure to check it out thanks for all your support!

Wow, that’s a lot more coverage than most people were able to score from a visit to the broken health insurance exchange website. Another amazing coincidence: Henderson lists himself on LinkedIn as an Organizing for America (i.e., @BarackObama) volunteer working to continue the president’s agenda.

Over to you for some follow-ups and retractions, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chattanooga Times Free Press, The Huffington Post, Enroll America, and POLITICO!!

Update: Question asked:

.@SterlingCBeard so it’s possible to sign someone up for a monthly $250 bill w/out them knowing it? Steal their identity and health info?

— Sarah Stevenson (@sarahrstevenson) October 4, 2013

Twitchy attempts the direct route:

.@chadhenderson did you really enroll in Obamacare via http://t.co/fLyCkUdbjl? Can you prove it? http://t.co/whyOgAfwA3 [email protected]

— TwitchyTeam (@TwitchyTeam) October 4, 2013

“Henderson’s tale about his embrace of Obamacare has a ‘Manti Te’o girlfriend meets Milli Vanilli’ feel to it,” Twitchy notes. Presumably, Chad is in full “Sebelius, coordinate! Sebelius, coordinate!” mode right about now.

More: “Twitter pals are flagging this recent tweet from Henderson himself. Note the word ‘bought:'”

Whoops.

Update: I may have used the wrong pop culture analogy above, in light of this post by Troy Senik of Ricochet:

The kicker: the legacy media, with Reason’s dust in its face, scrambled to catch up — which left it to our old friend, Sarah Kliff at the Washington Post, to report this gem:

I spoke with Chad over the phone about this situation. He told me that he has indeed not purchased coverage but doesn’t believe he was lying.

You guys get that you own the ‘truthiness’ thing now, right?

In retrospect, perhaps instead of a Star Trek “Norman, coordinate” reference, I should have gone with Seinfeld: