Megan McArdle isn’t impressed with GOP claims that only two-thirds of ♡bamaCare!!! enrollees have paid their first month’s premium:
The real problem is that they offer only one hard number — 2.45 million paid on the exchange as of April 15 — and seem to have inexplicably omitted data from two states. Everything else is expressed in percentages, so it’s hard to compare any of their numbers with anything else. I can’t even make sense of the numbers they do have: 2.45 million is 67 percent of 3.7 million, which is about 1.7 million short of the final enrollment tally for the federal exchanges. That’s data the insurers should have had if they were really answering on April 15 — which means either that the GOP didn’t survey all the insurers or that they are including responses that were sent before the final enrollment surge.
The White House is in an interesting bind: It is trying to dispute the numbers while claiming that it doesn’t know how many people have paid.
The GOP claims don’t look very solid, do they? But the White House has absolutely no reason to squeal until they provide substantiated figures — which they steadfastly refuse to do.
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