The numbers, they are awful:
I’ve complained at great length about the Barack Obama administration’s lack of transparency surrounding the Affordable Care Act. But I don’t even know what to say about this latest revelation, courtesy of Bloomberg News’s own Alex Wayne: The administration counted stand-alone dental plans in order to claim that 7.3 million people had signed up during the first open enrollment period. Without the addition of the dental plans, enrollment would have very slightly missed its target of 7 million enrollees. Moreover, simple arithmetic indicates that it is still counting them in its current claims about enrollment.
Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell seems to be saying that this was some sort of mistake. And it’s possible that this is all it is. But I would be more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt if the administration hadn’t otherwise been managing enrollment data so aggressively, releasing good figures as soon as it had them but sitting on bad data as long as possible, and ceasing to issue regular reports as soon as open enrollment stopped and the numbers began to decline rather than rise.
You wonder what other goodies might be propping up the imaginary numbers?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member