It’s the final day for Obamacare’s official open
enrollment period. (The special open enrollment period for folks
who miss out the first time around starts tomorrow.) The day
started with a website
outage. Between 3 a.m. and 9 a.m. the federal health insurance
exchange at the heart of the law was down, and unable to process
new applications.
Obama administration officials say it was a software bug that
popped up during scheduled maintenance. It probably didn’t have
anything to do with the crushing traffic load that was reported
over the weekend. Via
The Wall Street Journal, enrollment points online and off
were slammed over the last few days:
Federal officials said HealthCare.gov had two million visitors
over the weekend. On Friday, the site had blocked people trying to
log in for about two hours starting at 4 p.m. Eastern, and they
were told to wait until the site had fewer users, said a person
familiar with the site’s operations. On Sunday, the site was
holding up well, the person said, handling some 50,000 simultaneous
users, up from a previous peak of 40,000.Long waits to reach a federal call center for help also
frustrated some applicants. Federal officials said the center
received about 270,000 calls Saturday from people trying to apply
by phone or resolve problems with their online
application.
The Journal, along with other
news outlets, reports that enrollment centers faced long lines
over the weekend. Combined with last week’s announcement of 6
million sign-ups, it looks like this year’s open enrollment period
will finish with a last minute surge. At this point, I expect we’ll
see at least 6.5 million sign-ups by the end of today. It could
easily be 6.7 million.
But as insurance industry consultant Bob Laszewski
argues, this isn’t the number we really want to know.
Of course, the more than 6 million enrollment the administration
recently announced overstates Obamacare’s success because this
includes enrollments that were never completed since the person
never paid the premium. There are lots of reasons why a consumer
might not complete the enrollment. The person may have hit the
enroll button a number of times and ended up paying only once. It
may have been one of the infamous “834” transactions that never
made sense and the consumer ended up having to enroll again later.
Or, the person might have had second thoughts about the
cost/benefit of Obamacare and decided not to move forward.Then there were a measurable number of people who paid their
first month’s premium but never paid the second month’s premium. I
am told that 2% to 5% of January’s enrollments never paid in
February, for example.Whatever the reason, the real enrollment number will likely be
about 20% lower than what the administration finally
reports.
It’s not just that the sign-ups figure provided by the
administration don’t reflect real enrollments. It’s that they don’t
tell us about the net gain in the number of uninsured.
There are two important pieces of information we need to have
before the country can really answer this fundamental question
about the way Obamacare accomplished health insurance reform:
- How many people have actually paid and completed their
enrollment?- To what extent have we reduced the ranks of the uninsured—how
many of these people who enrolled were previously insured and how
many of them were previously uninsured?Reporters often ask these questions and the Obama administration
says they don’t know. And, that’s the end of it.But these questions are easily answered.
Every insurance company knows exactly how many people it has
enrolled and who paid their premium at the end of every billing
period. How else would they be able to process the claims for these
people?
We’ll probably get this information eventually. And we’ll
certainly get surveys and other attempts to quantify the changes in
the meantime. But I think it’s going to be a while before we have a
reliable count of how many have enrolled, and how many are newly
insured.
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