The Administration’s Continually Shifting Standards for Obamacare’s Success

Calling Obamacare a success requires defining
standards for what success looks like. In theory, those standards
should be consistent over time.

But as National Journal’s Sam Baker pointed out earlier
this month, the administration has
repeatedly backed off its own success metrics.

Just a few months ago, Health and Human Services Secretary
Kathleen Sebelius said success would entail covering 7 million
people this year. Now, the White House has disowned that standard
for enrollment—and it hasn’t come up with a new one.

President Obama touted HealthCare.gov, the main
portal to shop for coverage, as the “Amazon” or “Expedia” of health
insurance. Now the administration is calling it a win for the site
to be “functional for the vast majority of users,” and even that
standard has been watered down since its debut.

And when the law passed, it was expected to reduce the federal
deficit by about $210 billion over a decade. Now the projected
savings are about half that, largely because one big program proved
unworkable.

In a recent follow-up, Baker
notes that the White House is once again downplaying one of its
goals for the law—the necessity of getting a large-enough number of
young and healthy adults into the exchanges:

White House officials consistently—and accurately—argue that the
most important metric for Obamacare’s success this year is the mix
of young and old enrollees. But they’re backing away from their own
goals for that mix.

Getting young people into the system is critical to holding down
premiums, and therefore to keeping each state’s insurance market
stable. Administration officials previously said their target was
for young adults to make up about 38 percent of Obamacare
enrollees. Now that standard is down to about 30 percent. Or maybe
even 24 percent—where the mix stands now. 

I’d add another item to this list, which is that the law was
supposed to be popular. Before the law passed, Democrats
predicted on multiple occasions that it would quickly become
reasonably well-liked by the public. Then when opposition continued
in the months after passage, Obamacare backers updated their
argument, saying that in 2014 when the law’s biggest benefits
kicked in, the public would shift. But at least so far, that

hasn’t happened. If anything, the law has become less popular
in the last year.

At this point, the White House has backed off so many of its own
definitions of success that it’s not clear what would constitute a
failure. The administration seems to be defining Obamacare success
if it continues to exist.