Enrollment In Obamacare's Federal Exchange So Far Is In The 'Single Digits'
Wanted to post this article here as sometimes I forget that certain places I post on this board are populated primarily by libs and it can get me (and my rep) down. Positive rep me if you are for freedom in America. Thanks, GoodOwl.
I expect this number to climb over the next few months, but even I am shocked at the initial failure so far. The technical problems with the site I would imagine will be worked out eventually. Though why they did not delay something that was clearly not ready to go makes no sense. Any business would not have chosen to go forward until they were more ready. Seems like the Republican request for a delay is prudent in that respect. Time will tell, I guess:
Enrollment In Obamacare's Federal Exchange, So Far, Is In The 'Single Digits'
10/03/2013 @ 12:20PM Avik Roy FORBES
On October 1, Obamacare’s subsidized insurance exchanges went live. Most of the exchange websites crashed on the first day, a development that led some of the law’s supporters to conclude that there was overwhelming demand for Obamacare’s insurance products. But the Obama administration isn’t releasing figures as to the number of Americans who have actually signed up for exchange-based coverage. “Very, very few people that we’re aware of have enrolled in the federal exchange,” said one insurance industry official to the Washington Post. “We are talking single digits.”
Exchange agencies walk back high-traffic hype
Other exchanges have had to pare down their initial statistics. Covered California, that state’s subsidized insurance exchange, initially claimed that its website had received 5 million hits on October 1. They later had to revise that number down 87 percent, to 645,000. KUSI-TV in San Diego is reporting that after the exchanges opened, with all the traffic, not one policy has yet been sold on the California exchange. (poster's comment: really? the seventh biggest economy in the world and NOT ONE SOLD??)
According to Megan McArdle, high traffic alone doesn’t explain why the federal healthcare.gov website is having so many issues. For example, the drop-down boxes for security questions aren’t working, which shouldn’t be a traffic-related problem. “The drop-down thing is mystifying,” a programmer source told McArdle. It “could very easily be because deadline pressure caused them to take some shortcuts that impacted their ability to scale.”
Glitches around traffic and web server loads will be relatively easy to fix. The real question is this: will healthier and younger individuals, who stand to face steep premium hikes under Obamacare, pay up? A Manhattan Institute study I helped conduct suggests that average to younger-than-average men will face underlying rate hikes of 97 to 99 percent, with women facing increases of 55 to 62 percent.
AAF: 30-year-old men face average premium hikes of 260%
A new study from the American Action Forum that looks at healthy 30-year-old men finds that underlying premiums for those individuals will increase by an average of 260 percent. The AAF study compared the least-expensive plans available today to the cheapest plans on the Obamacare exchanges, as did the Manhattan Institute study. The MI analysis, by contrast, adjusted those pre-ACA rates to take into account sicker individuals.
In a sense, the AAF study is more relevant to the problem at hand. Obamacare makes healthy people pay more for insurance in order to subsidize sicker people. It makes younger people pay more to subsidize older people. It makes men pay more to subsidize women. It makes everyone pay more to cover benefits, taxes, and fees that consumers might not ordinarily want.
Keep an eye on who enrolls, not just how many
I fully expect that the people who get a good deal out of Obamacare—poorer and sicker individuals—will sign up. The enrollment figures will increase. But the real question isn’t how many people enroll: it’s what kind of people enroll. Two-thirds of the uninsured in America are under the age of 40. What will be the average age of an enrollee on the exchanges? If most enrollees were born before or during the Nixon administration, start worrying.
INVESTORS’ NOTE: Aetna (NYSE:AET), UnitedHealth (NYSE:UNH), WellPoint (NYSE:WLP), Molina (NYSE:MOH), and Humana (NYSE:HUM) are leading players in developing products for health insurance exchanges. Public exchanges, which opened on October 1, are a key feature of Obamacare’s efforts to expand health insurance coverage.
(This post was last modified: 10-03-2013 03:07 PM by GoodOwl.)
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Enrollment In Obamacare's Federal Exchange So Far Is In The 'Single Digits'
