April Fools

The President was ebullient in the White House Rose Garden yesterday, April 1st, as he announced that 7.1 million people have signed up for Obamacare.

That number may or may not be meaningful. The purpose of the Affordable Care Act was to insure some 30 million people who previously lacked insurance. The country has been turned inside out in order to achieve this. Trillions of dollars will be spent over the next decade to accomplish it. So how many people who had been uninsured are among the 7.1 million? The administration won't say, but a Rand Corporation study which the administration has been sitting on but which was obtained by the Los Angeles Times, found that the number of uninsured who have now signed up for insurance and paid their premium is considerably less than a million.

The UK Daily Mail has the story here.

Numbers from a RAND Corporation study that has been kept under wraps suggest that barely 858,000 previously uninsured Americans – nowhere near 7.1 million – have paid for new policies and joined the ranks of the insured by Monday night.

Others were already insured, including millions who lost coverage when their existing policies were suddenly cancelled because they didn't meet Obamacare's strict minimum requirements.

Still, [the President] claimed that 'millions of people who have health insurance would not have it' without his insurance law.'

[Press Secretary Jay Carney] dodged tough questions about other statistics that reporters thought he should have had at the ready. Those numbers included how many Americans have paid for their insurance policies, and are actually insured. Also, he had no answer to the thorny question of how few signups represented people who had no insurance before the Affordable Care Act took effect.

The Affordable Care Act carried with it the promise of covering 'every American,' and it appears to have fallen tremendously short.

There's more at the link.

When the President tells us that the administration met its goal for sign-ups in the first enrollment period we might keep in mind that he also assured us, repeatedly, that if we liked our doctors and our healthcare plan we could keep them. He also told us that our policies would be on average $2500 cheaper under the AFA. So, maybe it'd be prudent to take whatever he tells us with a truckload of salt.