Only two-thirds of Healthcare.gov enrollees paid their first month’s dues? That’s what the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee was told and it’s not good:
Data provided to the committee by every insurance provider in the health care law’s Federally Facilitated Marketplace (FFM) shows that, as of April 15, 2014, only 67 percent of individuals and families that had selected a health plan in the federally facilitated marketplace had paid their first month’s premium and therefore completed the enrollment process. Nationwide, only 25 percent of paid enrollees are ages 18 to 34. The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations today invited the leaders of some of the nation’s largest insurance providers and their trade groups to testify at a hearing, “PPACA Enrollment and the Insurance Industry,” on Wednesday, May 7, 2014, at 10:15 a.m. in room 2123 Rayburn House Office Building.
With a law with deadlines as flexible as ♡bamaCare!!!’s, extending the grace period ought to be no problem. Although I don’t see why someone who didn’t want insurance badly enough to pay for it on April 15 will suddenly decide it’s a good deal on May 15. Or September 15. But hey, maybe the “law’s” supporters will get lucky and those people will contract something horrible enough to convince them to pay up.
This comes via Allahpundit (H/T) who adds:
One big caveat here: Because they’re only looking at states that use the federal exchange, they’re missing the numbers from states that run their own exchanges — which include hugely populous behemoths like California and New York. If those states are seeing higher rates of payment, for whatever reason, then the payment rate nationally is actually higher than this. We’ll need to wait and see. If the payment rate in those states isn’t higher then the number of true, paid enrollments nationally is something on the order of 5.36 million, more than two and a half million less than the number Obama’s been waving around.
California has such an outlandish number of welfare cases (one third of the entire nation’s, despite having only about 12% or so of the country’s population) that one would have to assume Californians are signing up for ♡bamaCare!!! or Expanded Medicaid benefits in big numbers, too.
Even so, that does nothing to help the solvency of ♡bamaCare!!! in any of the other states, since each state is its own little insurance fiefdom. So us non-Californians may earn the privilege of having even more of our tax dollars poured into that sinkhole, while our own unloved exchanges go belly up.
Subsidies today, subsidies tomorrow, subsidies forever!
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