Your ♡bamaCare!!! Fail of the Day

These are not the enrollees you’re looking for:

By March, the percentage of young adults in the pool was hovering at around 25 percent. As I wrote back then, to get to the 38.5 percent that the administration was originally targeting, they needed for there to be a huge surge in enrollment — and for that surge to be much, much younger than the previous waves of enrollees.

They certainly got the surge. And the surge was indeed somewhat younger than previous waves … but not nearly sufficient to bring the demographics in line.

A month ago, assuming a much smaller surge than we got, I also assumed that the demographics would stay bad. I assumed that if we did get a big surge, we would also get much better demographics. The one thing I didn’t assume was that we’d get a huge influx of enrollees — and that we’d still only be at 28 percent young adults. I’m still at a loss to explain it.

That’s Megan McArdle, and I won’t claim to have an explanation, either. Except of course for the gut feeling that selling people a product they don’t currently need or want at any price was never going to be much of a winner. And there’s that other gut feeling that older, sicker people — who want and need insurance and are more likely to be able to afford it — would be the big takers of the big exchange subsidies.

So I’m forced to assume that the Administration has been forced to issue another delay, this one on the deadline for cutting the deficit and saving us money.