Suprise! Uninsured Barely Signing Up For Obamacare

Wasn’t the stated purpose of the “Affordable” Care Act to make sure that the 30-45 million Americans without health insurance receive health insurance? How’s that working out?

(Washington Post) The new health insurance marketplaces appear to be making little headway in signing up Americans who lack insurance, the Affordable Care Act’s central goal, according to a pair of new surveys.

Only one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private plans through the new marketplaces enrolled as of last month, one of the surveys shows. The other found that about half of uninsured adults have looked for information on the online exchanges or planned to look. (snip)

One of the surveys, by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., shows that among people who are uninsured and do not intend to get a health plan through one of the exchanges, the biggest factor is that they believe they cannot afford it.

Strange. Cannot afford it. That survey stated that only around 27% of the signups were for the previously uninsured.

“If there is one point to the law, it is to lower the number of uninsured,” said Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health-policy organization. “Ultimately, that has to happen for the law to be judged a success.”

Well, surely HHS will have a way of measuring this, considering the billions dumped into starting the Exchanges, right?

But the online application, which most people use to enroll, asks whether people want to apply for coverage but does not give them a place to indicate whether they have insurance now or have had it in the past. As a result, HHS analysts have no way to assess how many of the online enrollees were uninsured in the past.

Excellent! No way of measuring the stated point of the law. Sam Baker discusses this a bit more.

Meanwhile, the number who state that Obamacare has hurt them has inched up to 23%, with those saying it has helped dropping from a whopping 13% down to 10%. 63% say no effect.

Crossed at Right Wing News.

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