Ignore the Administration’s Inflated Obamacare Coverage Numbers

In a speech to the Democratic
Governor’s Association last week, president Obama touted the
success of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. “We’ve got close to 7
million Americans who have access to health care for the first time
because of Medicaid expansion,” he said.

That’s false.

We don’t know how exactly many people have gotten health
coverage through Medicaid for the first time as a result of
Obamacare, but the actual number is certainly much lower than the 7
million President Obama claimed.

As The Washington Post’s Fact Checker
explains—again—the 7 million figure comes from reports counting
the number of people who have enrolled in Medicaid since October 1
last year, when Obamacare’s online exchanges launched. But many of
those enrollments are in states that did not participate in the
law’s Medicaid expansion, and many of those who signed up in states
that did participate were renewing existing coverage. Avalere
Health, a health consulting firm that has been tracking Obamacare’s
implementation,
estimates that the number of new enrollees is somewhere in the
range of 1.1 to 1.8 million. (And that number counts people who
were previously eligible prior to Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion
but signed up after the fact.)

That’s Medicaid. What about private coverage? Once again, solid
numbers are hard to pin down. But the true number of enrollees is
virtually certain to be lower than the administration’s headline
estimates.

The administration said earlier this month that, by the end of
January, 3.3 million people had signed up for private coverage
through the exchanges. But that figure leaves two important
questions unanswered: How many people have paid the first premium,
a requirement to actually be enrolled in coverage? And how many of
those people were previously uninsured?

We don’t have good answers to either question. But we can be
pretty sure that once we do, the total will be substantially lower
than the administration’s topline number.

Several reports have cited

insurance industry insiders to estimate that roughly 20
percent, and perhaps as much as 30 percent, of exchange-based
coverage sign-ups haven’t paid.

That means a significant downward revision is coming—a 20 to 30
percent reduction would bring total enrollments down to between
2.31 million and 2.64 million.

But remember: Millions of people had their individual insurance
policies cancelled as a result of Obamacare. Some policies that
were set to be cancelled under the law were extended for a year,
but even still, it’s likely that there’s a sizable cohort of
individuals who lost coverage and moved into exchange-based
policies. Other previously covered people may have moved into the
exchanges for different reasons.

What that means is that the number of previously uninsured
people who have gotten covered through the exchanges is probably
even lower than the number of paid enrollments. How much lower? We
really don’t know. At some point, this information may be tracked
by the administration through the exchanges. But not for a while.
That functionality is among many crucial website back-end features
that have not been completed yet. 

Basically, reliable numbers are impossible to come by at this
point. And as
this Politico report notes, we may not know for a lot
longer. Without real-time tracking through the exchanges, we’ll
have to wait for a reliable independent study—or census data when
it comes out next year. Until then, inflated claims of success like
the one President Obama made last week ought to be ignored.