From the Thursday edition of the Morning Jolt:
Terrific: 58% of Uninsured Haven’t Even Looked at the Exchanges Yet
Before we begin this morning’s buffet table of bad news for Obamacare, a quick note on the typically bad-faith accusation from the Left that we’re somehow enjoying all the problems stemming from the implementation of this law.
From the beginning, Obamacare fans inside and outside of government insisted that they were right, that we were wrong, and that we were motivated by all sorts of malicious and callous motives. They insisted our skepticism was fueled by ignorance and outdated ideology. Our warnings and dire predictions were dismissed as sour-grapes negativity and pessimism.
Most of the ideas from the Right — medical-malpractice reform, interstate sales of insurance — were ignored or dismissed. We said you couldn’t require insurance companies to cover a lot of new expenses — i.e., pre-existing conditions — without driving up costs, and that higher costs inevitably would drive up premiums. Obama’s promise that his plan would lower premiums by $2,500 per year for families was always industrial-strength snake-oil, and yet somehow we were the bad guys for saying it couldn’t possibly happen, short of covering the costs from the discovery of the leprechaun’s pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Now it is exceedingly clear that one-sixth of the nation’s economy is being fouled up beyond recognition by a convoluted, complicated, poorly planned Rube Goldberg scheme of a law that has been implemented by hacks whose overestimation of their own abilities is on an astronomical level.
So we’re not enjoying any of the problems from Obamacare, but spare us the insistence that we not take any satisfaction in seeing our assessment of the world, the limits of policy, the capabilities of government, and the possibility of grandiose, utopian promises reaffirmed, verified, underlined, highlighted, and footnoted in high-definition, day after day.
Anyway, today’s roundup:
Most of the uninsured haven’t even looked at the exchanges yet:
Ten percent of uninsured Americans in the poll say they have applied for insurance under the exchanges. Thirty-two percent say they have looked up information about the exchanges but have not applied; 58 percent have not looked up information about health insurance exchanges.
Oh, and 59 percent of the uninsured think getting health insurance would “hurt them financially.”
Remember, all of this grief and aggravation is driven by the aim to get the uninsured to buy insurance.
Just how many Americans are losing insurance?
In the poll, 13 percent of insured Americans say they’ve received a notice that their health insurance plan is being cancelled or changed because it does not meet the minimum coverage requirements under the 2010 health care law.
Better hope the server change goes smoothly:
Some technical experts are perplexed at the U.S. government’s plan to switch web hosts for its new health insurance portal, HealthCare.gov, in the midst of an expected last-minute rush to beat a March 31 enrollment deadline for 2014 coverage. Switching hosts is not in and of itself a huge risk if it is done carefully and with lots of preparation, according to technical experts interviewed by Reuters. It is the timing of the highly complex maneuver that is risky. If there are problems, the website could become sluggish or even unusable for anyone trying to enroll. The government is tempting fate, they said.
Hey, come on. What are the odds of something going wrong with HealthCare.gov?
Illinois officials are e-mailing and calling some 30,000 people, advising them to start over on their health insurance applications. They say it’s possible they were referred to Medicaid. Officials advise if the screener at the Get Covered Illinois website sends them back to healthcare.gov, they should create a new account with a different e-mail address and submit a new application.
And enrollment in some states remains abysmal:
As of Wednesday, the New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange had spent at least $2.5 million on marketing and outreach campaigns to get people to buy health insurance. And as of Wednesday, 291 people had enrolled for coverage beginning Jan. 1 on NMHIX’s small business exchange.