Far more people like Obamacare than are willing to pay for it.
In January, 12.7 million people enrolled, but 1.6 million of them never paid any premiums.
Their policies were cancelled.
The Hill reports ObamaCare Enrollment Drops to 11.1M.
ObamaCare enrollment dropped to about 11.1 million people at the end of March, according to new figures released by the administration. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said enrollment fell to about 11.1 million, down from the 12.7 million who signed up for coverage before the Jan. 31 deadline.
A dropoff was expected, and has occurred in previous years as well, given that some people who sign up do not pay their premiums. The administration says it still projects that about 10 million people will remain signed up by the end of they year.
The Congressional Budget Office had at one point projected that 2016 enrollment would be as high as 21 million people.
Sign of Success
Kevin Counihan, the CEO of the ObamaCare marketplaces, said the fact that about a million more people are signed up than at a similar point last year (11.1 million compared to 10.2 million) is a sign of success.
“This increased level of enrollment demonstrates the strength of the Marketplace over time, as millions of Americans continue to have access to quality and affordable coverage when they need it,” Counihan said.
Success as Defined by ObamaCare Marketplace CEO
- 2016 Goal: 21 million
- 2016 Actual: 11.1 million
- Success: 52.86% of target
Free Months
How many people signed up early January, then when they did not get sick by March, decided to take their chances for the rest of the year.
Addendum
Success is in the eyes of the beholder.
Many people emailed me along the lines “Failure advances a single payer system. Failure is success”
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
its a fabulous deal if you get a subsidy or do not have to pay. For those people its yes. For the rest who have to pay for the others, its likely no.
Isn’t that with anything? like if you just graduated college and are under age 26 and can stay under parents plan? and when parents make the rent, car payment & student loan payments due to some deep seated guilt and social acceptance peddled by CNN & NPR?
You get what you pay for. How are these Obamacare plans a “fabulous deal” if very few doctors & few if any specialists (and virtually no private hospitals) accept such plans or if you have a $5,000 deductible each year that you have to pay out of pocket before this “insurance” covers anything…
Man, I hate this law. Before Obamacare too effect I was paying a premium of $169 on a real basic policy. Then that policy became obsolete under the new law. The premiums I was offered were $340 a month. I said screw it. Now I just go and negotiate my health care costs with the providers and bank whatever money I would pay these insurance companies for future health costs. I buy all my medicines with cash, and get generic when available. I got to low cost clinics and get basic care. And since my income is middle class, I don’t qualify for an subsidies or Medicaid. I’m a veteran too. I tired to get on with the damn VA. But they are so backed up I haven’t heard from them in months!
sorry about the typos..pounding the keyboard with ANGER!
Like
really you are able to get that far?? most doctors offices will hang up on you in a NY minute if your insurance isn’t accepted..
Generic medications used to be reasonably priced before 2010, now prices for even an antibiotic equivalent of penicillin is confiscatory at any pharmacy if you pay cash or if you are on a plan thru the ACA that offers covers very few medications and also subject to that $5,000 annual deductible
Try Indian (dot not how) pharmacies. 1/10 of the price at least.
Maybe if there could be a breakdown of the costs of the program first…leaving aside the premium increases for now … then at least we could get a “parts per billion” estimate of what the actual Government expenditure in fact is.
So let’s start with the size of HHS itself…and query “to what extent does is Doctor and how?”
Obviously the point of having such a large Agency is to avoid the Twin Towers of Doctors needing insurance and the tort lobby.
If the latter two cannot be avoided then what is the purpose of HHS again?
You can get insurance for 2 months without paying? Deal. I thought the goal of the law was 100% insurance coverage? It’s still running around 15% uninsured I think.
100% was a marketing ploy… Designed to fail was the real goal leading to the single payer euthanasia system like in England. It’s all about what the elites want.
The political class (why do you call criminals “elites”?) has already invested milliions in concierge doctors and private clinics.
Single payer system is also designed to fail — just as it has in every other country. See the oil royalties and other unsustainable subsidies before trying to claim any national health system is viable.
Weren’t there people living in homes where they hadn’t made a mortgage payment for 12 months??
Tesla Autopilot in fatal crash: http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/30/technology/tesla-autopilot-death/index.html. The government is coming and they are here to help.
ACA/OCare=Slow motion train wreck. I think it was designed to be that way as a harbinger of a Single Payer system. Europe here we come. 🙁
Here are some related quotes. I’m sure there are many more…
“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand” – Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate Economist
“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ ”- Ronald Reagan – 40th president of US (1911 – 2004)
“Politicians are the lowest form of life on earth. Liberal Democrats are the lowest form of politicians.” – General George S. Patton
“Everything a governement touches, turns to crap.” – Ringo Star
“I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.” – Will Rogers
“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” – Thomas Jefferson
“There is nothing that politicians like better than handing out benefits to be paid for by someone else.” – Thomas Sowell
“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office” – Aesop
“When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it.” – Clarence Darrow
“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” – Milton Friedman
“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public”
“If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.” – P.J. O’Rourke
Why did silver rise over 18? Yes gold is higher also.The EU approved 150 billion bailout to Italy. How many skeletons are in the closet.? Will BREXIT cause removal of facades that control the sheeple .When facades collapse the elites lose control.. Mish was right about gold but the prediction was unpopular. Well done.
To be fair my last buy recommendation was quite a bit early.
Others were spot on
Mish
Now over $19!
“Failure is success” is the theme of this admin. Just sayin, look for yourself…..
Think of a metastasized cloward-piven strategy?
The American uninsured rate has dropped from about 18 percent to less than 10 percent. The vast majority of people on Obamacare are receiving subsidies or on Medicaid Expansion. In other words the vast majority of people are paying a lot less for health care they previously couldn’t afford or couldn’t access due to a pre existing condition. Yes some folks are paying a higher premium. But in most cases they are also getting a more comprehensive health insurance policy. No more bare bones plans that don’t come through when you need them.
Obamacare is far from perfect. The pharmaceutical industry continues to make out like bandits, among others. But having health insurance is a good thing. There will be a lot fewer bankruptcies due to lack of health insurance. And health insurance is closely associated with living. People who don’t have it, die at much higher rates. So on balance, Obamacare is a good thing, no two ways about it.
Gruber chimes in.
Yeah how much is Obama paying trolls these days?
Government takeovers end in bankruptcy. Best examples are PEMEX and PDVSA. ARAMCO is getting there fast enough that the king would like to sell shares.
The ACA or Obamacare was accurately judged to be a tax by Chief Justice Roberts. So the measure of success by that criteria should be the amount of revenue collected by the IRS (penalties, etc.). Revenues collected then needs to be balanced against revenues paid out (e.g. subsidies to individuals, insurance companies, health care exchanges, administrative expenses).
As a metric, number of Obamacare enrollees reminds me of number eyeballs during the great dot.com Internet fraud/boom. Of course, with USA.gov there will be no bankruptcy, only higher Obamacare taxes, premiums, co-pays and deductibles disguised as much as possible. No coincidence that the higher penalties (taxes) will not hit most people until after the 2016 election. The Totalitarian Socialist party learned well from Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
I saw this coming in 2009, canceled my insurance back then (why wait for the inevitable train wreck?) and started investing the premium money back then (so I would have it, rather than the insurance companies). I am surprised so many people obediently spend tens of thousands of dollars for high-deductible policies rather than pay a relatively small IRS penalty. Unlike marijuana and other crimes, there is no jail time for not being an obediently robotic consumer and opting out of the game/con. GOP did us a service by preventing IRS from jailing us for dissent or deliberately practicing health care self-sufficiency. Hilary and the socialist democrats would no doubt like to criminalize health care self-sufficiency, and will do so, along with more income confiscation, if they control the levers of power (courts, congress, white house).
Stop the presses! Lazy Obama / Hilary supporters like Free Shit!!
Also, the sky is blue and there is water in the ocean. These and more startling revelations will be explained in my new book “How to completely F#ck up an economy that **was** working”
Single payer is the only way to go…although I do think that unhealthy fat f**ks should be penalized in some way, shape or form. I guess I’ll have to be content with the fact that most of these unhealthy losers lead a miserable life and die early (Yay!). At a minimum though, all their assets should be confiscated to repay any government paid healthcare they received — in a similar fashion to what Medicare does.
Single payer systems will never work because of who socialists think that single payer should be.
Tell us about the latest 5yr plan to fix Amtrak, and how the US Post Office will never raise stamp prices beyond 29 cents.
Tell us about the superiority of Venezuela’s economy, or Bolivia. Tell us how socialist France is a democracy — under martial law and unemployment levels double the rest of Europe.
And tell us why the UK’s NHS and Canada’s health system both rely on oil royalties to make ends meet — while fat cat politicians get their healthcare overseas. Tell us why health costs in both the UK and Canada are rising just as fast as under ObamaCare — and how they don’t pay their share of drug development costs.
Tell us how your single payer has managed to send Medicare into bankruptcy, with even Obama’s accountants admitting the system cannot survive past 2018 (private accountants say it will be gone before then).
Tell us how many doctors will not accept new medicare patients, and how Medicare takes on average 19 months to pay a claim.
In short: stop acting like that infant Juncker and grow up.
Yep. It should be called “single denier” rather than single payer. Because once government is responsible for paying, they’re going to do a whole lot of delaying and non-paying. People are nuts if they think Illinois is an exception – they will be the new standard.
Payment delayed is payment denied. If you’re not getting paid, you stop providing the service, no matter what profession you’re in. So docs will raise their prices in hopes of recovering half of it, and government will then start price-fixing schemes. And then the health care shortage will be in full swing.
My wife is an Advanced Practicing Nurse. She sees a lot of individuals who will sign up for the healthcare, go to the Dr. and get their prescriptions and medical care, then not pay their bills or insurance. The bill goes to insurance is not reimbursed and she and the Dr. are out their service. Very commonly done- a
‘great’ scam by those involved.
I’m sure it’s often a scam, but I bet a lot of times the patients were just clueless about how much the insurance was going to cost them. Or overly optimistic, or misled by the “navigators.” We have a family friend who was told by the navigators that she’d be getting subsidies that she did not get, and so she was not able to afford the premiums when they showed up “after the fact” as part of her IRS bill.
I suspect at least part of the non payment, is also on account of billing procedures not having been properly sorted out between insurance cos and the marketplaces. Perhaps even because the carriers aren’t really all that interested in selling these policies, but are instead simply playing along. Doing as little as they can to prevent a “valued” customer from dropping off.
I work with a fair amount of freelancers, many of whom have bought insurance through Obamacare exchanges, and several have mentioned not receiving bills, leaving it completely up to them to contact the policy providers and arrange for payments. One signed up for recurring pay, went on vacation and came back to a cancellation letter in the mail stating he had in fact been uninsured for a month. No bills or cancellation warnings. No emails, despite the whole signup being conducted online. No attempts at phone calls.
If that is typical, while it is still arguably the insured’s responsibility to pay for the policy, it is a pretty unusual way for someone who is owed money, to conduct business. Assuming they are really all that interested in keeping the customers they have acquired.
It’s becoming a new standard in business – expect people to pay without invoicing them. It’s totally foolish, but it gets sold as a way to whack FTE’s in the billing department because “most” people will pay anyway. Just pass the losses onto the suckers who DO pay without an invoice in the form of higher prices. I think businesses learned this tactic from government.
Indeed, because it is totally impossible by the laws of economics for a business to have a crappy billing service
Thank you for that info, Stuki Moi (I tried to “like” your post but the process is a big pain).
◾2016 Goal: 21 million
◾2016 Actual: 11.1 million
◾Success: 52.86% of target
In 2013 about 18% of Americans were not covered. At the end of 2015 that was down to 11.9%, the lowest figure ever recorded by Gallop. So how does the above blurb make any coherent sense?
Answer: it does not. Buying coverage through the exchange has lots of pros and cons but ultimately the goal was higher coverage rates and that has been achieved.
“Many people emailed me along the lines “Failure advances a single payer system. Failure is success”
The problem with this theory is that you only get to single payer if people are deeply demanding it. In 2013 over 80% of the population already had coverage. Now it is nearly 90%. Even in the exchanges 90% or so are happy enough to keep writing checks to pay their premiums (with or without subsidies). So how is this secret master plan to go for single payer going to work with 90% of the population covered and about 80% of the population covered who are more or less content (not thrilled granted) with the coverage they have?
But the real silliness here comes from the right. With a headline like:
“Obamacare 12.7 Million Enrolled, 11.1 Million Paid Premiums; Poll: Is This a Success?”
I think the real question is in your wacked out world could anything be a success? In Free Market NivanaLand how exactly does health insurance work? Do people not get a bill and write a check for it? Like anything else you write a check for, there will be so many people who simply won’t pay. Does electricity not work because some portion of people don’t pay their bills and the electric company cuts them off? Does cable TV not work because people don’t pay their bill? Do cell phones not work because people don’t pay their bills?
If anything the one who seems to be backing us into a rhetorical corner for single payer here is YOU Mish! If success can only mean everybody has coverage and no one is losing it because they don’t pay their bills then only single payer world work. You could make health care cost less than $100 a month and there will always be some people who just won’t write the check even then.
You are counting people who are now on expanded Medicaid. That hardly counts as part of “Obamacare”. It could have been done with Obamacare never having existed. There was never going to be a problem with getting a lot of people to sign up for a free program (of course it won’t actually be free to those whose premiums and treatments are ultimately clawed back from their estates).
Medicaid is not sold on the exchanges. You have 10M people there and you also have those who got and continue to get their coverage from their employers.
This system does not work cause I now pay nearly double what I used to and my 2k deductible is a thing of the past. Now it’s 12800 for the family with double the payments. So someone is making up for those not paying. And if I don’t pay the penalty will eventually be extremely sever.
Bankers are printing more medical inflation than people can afford. The inflation problem must be solved first.