Half the ♡bamaCare!!! enrollees in Georgia didn’t pay their first month’s premium. Here are the numbers, which unlike the White House’s, appear to be real:
Georgia insurers received more than 220,000 applications for health coverage in the Affordable Care Act’s exchange as of the official federal deadline of March 31, state officials said Wednesday.
Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens, though, said premiums have been received for only 107,581 of those policies, which cover 149,465 people.
The story comes from NRO’s Jim Geraghty, who ties Georgia’s numbers in with some recent polling data:
In a testament to how political affiliation potentially colors an individual’s view of the law, Morning Consult polling from November through April found that people reported more positive experiences in states with largely broken exchanges versus people who used the federal exchanges. And that includes states where the exchanges never were fully operational…
We separated states into three different groups to do this analysis. The “broken” state exchange group included Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon and Vermont. (While it is an inexact measurement, we put states where healthcare officials struggled throughout the enrollment period to fully launch their exchanges into the “broken” category.) The second group of states—those with relatively well running exchanges—included Washington, Rhode Island, New York, Kentucky, Colorado, Connecticut, California and the District of Columbia. All other states where included in our third group, as they used the federal exchange website to enroll customers.
Among these groups, you might expect the states with barely (or not-at-all) functioning exchanges to rank last when it comes to users’ experiences. But the federal exchanges took that spot in almost every measure.
Jim concludes that “there’s a strong possibility some Obama voters declared their state health insurance exchanges to be success even when they personally experienced its failure.”
Anyone who’s followed the decades-long struggle to reform Britain’s National Health Service shouldn’t be surprised by this disconnect. The reason reformers have such a tough go of it in Britain is that when polled, Britons report much better results and much shorter wait times than they actually experience under the NHS.
Ideology trumps real-world experience with Britain’s happy collectivists, so it follows that ours do the same.
Talk about giving your body for the cause.
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