"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Numbers on Obamacare... Pssst.... They're Not Good

Health and Human Services Director Kathleen Sebelius apparently has today announced that some 106,185 Americans signed up for Obamacare during the month of October, with only about 26,000 of those coming from the federal exchanges.   

Let's do some math, shall we?

There have been approximately 3.5 million Americans who have lost their private insurance due to Obamacare to date.   That's just in the individual market.   Obama's unilateral (and illegal) delay of the employer mandate means that millions more, perhaps tens of millions more people who will lose their policies will have that fact hidden from them until after the 2014 election.

That means that every day last month more American were losing their healthcare coverage than were enrolling for coverage under Obamacare in the entire month.

And remember... the administration already announced that it was going to "count" as enrolled people who had put a policy into their "shopping cart."   How many of those won't ever return to "check out"?   A lot, I'd venture to say, particularly given the extraordinarily bad press the program has gotten.

And, too, remember that enrolling isn't the same as paying that first premium.   That's when the rubber really hits the road in terms of how many people will actually get coverage through Obamacare.

And, finally, remember... the whole point of this exercise was that we had 47 million uninsured.   So, with this supposedly huge problem out there, isn't it a little odd that only 100,000 or so people bothered to try hard enough to get health insurance in a month?   That's about, oh, two-tenths of a percent.  So 99.8% of the uninsured either couldn't get through or said, "meh, who gives a shit?"   And for that we've created an enormous drag on economic growth and a $2 trillion entitlement program over the next ten years (and that's conservative).  

What a colossal, epic fail!    I'm with Charlie Cooke at NRO on this one... there's probably never been a bigger domestic policy failure in American history.  

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