Glenn linked to this Todd Shepherd report yesterday, and since it’s local news and ♡bamaCare, I figure I ought to see what I could do with it. The short version is, Senator Mark Udall — who I used to think of merely as inadequate, but whom I now know is also corrupt — tried to cook the books on Coloradans’ insurance cancellations. Here’s the scoop:
At the height of controversy surrounding President Obama’s promises on the federal health care overhaul, U.S. Senator Mark Udall’s office worked assiduously to revise press accounts that 249,000 Coloradans received health care cancellation notices. Because the 249,000 figure was produced inside the Colorado Division of Insurance, Udall’s office lobbied that agency to revise the figure, or revise their definition of what qualified as a cancellation.
From an email inside the Colorado Division of Insurance (DOI), Director of External Affairs Jo Donlin bluntly stated to her colleagues:
Sen. Udall says our numbers were wrong. They are not wrong. Cancellation notices affected 249,199 people. They want to trash our numbers. I’m holding strong while we get more details. Many have already done early renewals. Regardless, they received cancellation notices.
I know extrapolation is a risky business, but maybe we can glean something from Colorado’s 249,000 cancellations.
According to Wiki, Colorado in 2010 represented 1.53% of America’s population. We’ve had some decent growth here, so let’s go ahead and round that up to 1.6% in 2013. We’re trying to err on the conservative side, so if I’ve overestimated Colorado’s population, that will serve to drive the extrapolated figure downward, not up.
If we go by median income, Colorado ranks 15th in the nation at $55,387. Again, I’m using Wikipedia’s numbers, and this is the sort of thing Wiki usually gets right. Our per capita GDP is a bit lower than our median income, at $51,940 — but that’s good enough to us in 12th place producing 1.79% of the gross national product. These figures come from 2012 so I assume not much has changed.
If we go by population, to extrapolate from Colorado to nationwide, you’d have to multiply by 62.5 (100/1.6). If we go by state GDP, the multiplier drops to 55.87 (100/1.79). We have a lot of active duty and retired military, which should tend to drive Colorado’s portion of self-insured down. But Colorado is also small-business friendly, which would tend to drive that number back up. So I’m going to apply some Colorado windage, and drop the multiplier to an even 50 — and again, this will cause us to err on the conservative side.
So… if Colorado is fairly representative of the nation at large, and had 249,000 health insurance policies cancelled due to ♡bamaCare’s strictures, we would multiply that by 50 to see what might be happening nationally.
My handy desktop calculator says 12,450,000 cancellation notices from sea to shining sea.
That would be a lot of angry voters.
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