Will Obamacare Hit 7 Million Signups?

And, if so, will Kathleen Sebelius re-change her mind about 7 million being important? Better yet, will they pay?

(Fox News) On the last day to sign up for ObamaCare, the health care overhaul was reportedly on track to sign up more than 7 million Americans for insurance coverage, though the number of enrollees who have paid for their insurance premiums is still unclear.

Government officials confirmed the 7 million target to The Associated Press late Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter ahead of an official announcement.

Ms. Sebelius stated that, according to insurers, something like 10-20% haven’t made their first premium payment yet. And insurers and medical facilities are expected to eat the costs for a couple months until they can successfully dump the people.

Yet the bigger question is perhaps whether the law has indeed helped insure at least some of the estimated 48 million Americans who previously did not have insurance or couldn’t get it because of a pre-existing condition.

The most recent finding by the often-cited McKinsey & Company shows 27 percent of enrollees were previously uninsured and that roughly 75 percent of those who signed up for private insurance under ObamaCare have paid their premiums.

Good question: the idea was to insure the, depending on the day, 30-45 million Americans without health insurance. Yet, the majority are people who were the recipients of Obama’s lie of the year, “If you like you plan, you can keep your plan.”

(Forbes) If you apply that math to the RAND figures, you get this: of the people who have paid their first month’s premium on the Obamacare exchanges, and are thereby enrolled in coverage, 76 percent were previously insured, and 24 percent were previously uninsured.

In essence, this will be a break even proposition regarding those who lost their plans. And the uninsured will still be uninsured. Of course, a goodly chunk of those who did get Obamacare insurance might as well still be uninsured, since there is an average Bronze plan deductible of $5,081. Here’s Marc A. Theissen at The Washington Post

Recall that between 5 million and 6 million Americans lost their health plans because of Obamacare last fall. If the administration now succeeds in signing up 5 million to 6 million previously insured Americans, it will have achieved . . . nothing. Breaking even is no great accomplishment.

And let’s not forget: Many of those new Obamacare sign-ups are self-sufficient people who were previously paying their own way and now receive government subsidies for insurance. Creating government dependency is not progress – it’s a step backward.

A $2 trillion price-tag over 10 years, all for virtually zero movement in the uninsured. All while damaging the economy, decreasing work hours, reduced hiring, reduced take-home pay, more people shifted to part time hours, companies holding on to their cash due to the massive uncertainty created by Obamacare, burdensome regulation after burdensome regulation, a virtual federal takeover of the student loan industry (yes, that was part of Ocare), increased taxes, increased consumer costs….we could keep going and going, but, at the end of the day, the CBO predicts that there will still be 30 million uninsured.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

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