Losing Streak: WH Admits Improperly Inflating Obamacare Enrollment Figures

Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

Last spring, Obamacare supporters were ebullient when the Obama administration announced a milestone “victory:” Despite a truly disastrous roll-out, they’d enrolled eight million Americans in the program.

The Obamacare debate, the president said, was officially over. We expressed skepticism over the White House’s stats almost immediately, noting that the official numbers didn’t account for duplicates, non-paying “customers,” and consumer attrition — not to mention the high percentage of “new” enrollees who previously had insurance, but were forced to use Obamacare’s exchanges to obtain plans after their existing arrangements were cancelled under the new law. The last two weeks have witnessed two more blows for the “it’s working!” crowd. First came the sharply revised 2015 enrollment projections:

Fewer than 10 million people are expected to enroll in “Obamacare 2.0” for 2015, the Obama administration said Monday. That’s a significant drop from the original goal. The Congressional Budget Office had projected 13 million, but officials said they expect the ramp up to be slower than the CBO originally thought. The revised goal is 9 to 9.9 million. It raises questions about whether Obamacare enrollment will reach projections down the road. The CBO had projected enrollment would hit 25 million by 2017, but now the administration says it will probably take at least one or two more years to reach that threshold. Officials are realizing it will find it tougher to convince the remaining uninsured to enroll. Many who opted not to sign up this year said the cost was too high.

It’s almost as if many people aren’t too excited about purchasing less-than-affordable coverage that saddles them with high out-of-pocket costs and sparse provider networks. One thing the administration has going for it this year is that the individual mandate tax designed to punish shirkers is rising considerably, although those penalties are still much lower than the costs associated with buying Obamacare health plans. Now we have this embarrassing admission from administration officials, who’ve been forced to reveal how Team Obama inflated its top line enrollment figure…

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