The disastrous news related to Obamacare has been piling up so thick and fast that it’s hard to absorb one piece of it before the next arrives. Yesterday and today, the media was focused on the millions of people who have been kicked off their health insurance plans, Obama’s promise that such a thing wouldn’t happen, and his attempt to fix the problem. It’s seems bonkers that a mere two days ago, everyone was focused on a different piece of bad news: the amazingly low number of people who have enrolled in new, private insurance plans.
As many numbers were flying around, it may be helpful to present them all. 1,509,883 people are said to have filled out an application. Of those 1,081,592 were found to be eligible for private insurance. Many of the others would be eligible for Medicaid, and in states that have chosen the Medicaid expansion, a good-sized number have signed up for it: 396,000.
In the world of private insurance, however, the numbers are not so rosy. At total of 106,185 people have selected a plan. The Administration had predicted 500,000 would select a plan during the first month, and many other sources predicted an even higher number. So by any measure, that’s not good.
But it gets worse. “Selecting a plan” is not the same as buying a plan. No one seems to have nationwide data on how many people have bought plans, but there are some numbers from Washington D.C.: 321 people selected plans, 164 asked for an invoice on their plans, and a whopping 5 people have actually handed over money for a plan.
Of course, who knows how the nationwide numbers match up with DC’s? And whose knows how many of the people who have selected plans but not paid yet will eventually pay? I’d predict that in a few months, the number of people paying for private insurance in DC will be substantially higher than 5. But would you guess what the administration’s goal is for DC? It’s to enroll 43,000 people by March. So even if the eventually number for DC is a thousand or two thousand or three thousand times higher than what it is now, that’s still a huge shortfall.
That leads us to the next question: why aren’t people buying private health plans? It’s no secret that the federal website was a near-total failure, where most people find it impossible to apply. Some of the individual state exchanges failed as well, but others are successful. Kentucky’s and New York’s are most often cited as successes. In Kentucky, 39,207 people were found eligible for private insurance and 5,586 chose a plan. In New York, 134,897 were found eligible for private insurance and 16,404 chose a plan. So even in the most successful states, most of those who have been found eligible chose not to buy. Why?
In the absence of a poll to answer the question–one wonders why the government hasn’t produced any polls to answer this question–we can speculate. Perhaps some people were looking at their options but don’t plan to buy until later. Perhaps some people were so bowled over by the many wonderful options that they needed some time to recover before making their selection. But my guess is that the main reason is simple: people didn’t buy because the prices being offered were so high while the quality of the plans was so lousy.