100,000 people — pretty good, right?
ObamaCare is still kicking people off the insurance that they liked and were told they could keep (period!) far faster than it’s signing them up. And even if Professor Ditherton Wiggleroom hadn’t spent three years telling the lie — unchallenged by the press — that you could keep your plan, even if 5.5 million people hadn’t lost their coverage…
…then HealthCare.gov would still be nearly an order of magnitude behind its enrollment goals.
That’s right: They’ve enrolled about one-eighth the number of people they need at this point.
Of course, those “enrollments” include people who haven’t actually paid for their insurance, because the website still has no payment mechanism. It also includes people who have put a plan in their shopping basket, whether or not they actually intend to buy it. (How many items are saved in your Amazon basket? How many of them have been in there a year or more? Be honest!) Kathleen Sebelius might still be counting people who have merely managed, despite all the attendant aches and pains, to create valid accounts. Since I have never seen a decline in the enrollment figures, and Sebelius once admitted she was counting members of that last group as “enrolled,” then I suspect they are still being counted in the totals.
We must also subtract those who have signed up for expanded Medicare, because by definition they won’t be contributing to the risk pool — assuming for the moment one is extant. Instead, they will be by definition adding to the Giant Sucking Sound of tax dollars leaving your wallet.
I reminded you yesterday that the real fun would begin around the third week of December, if the expected rush of enrollees fails to materialize. But the really very quite real fun might begin on January 1st, when a rush of the newly-insured show up to see the doctor, only to be told they aren’t actually covered. Because there’s no payment system, and thus no insurance.
But for those people, I have pity instead of schadenfreude.
Unless they voted for Wiggleroom last year. They’ll just have to learn the hard way that elections have consequences.
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