Alan: At this very moment, Diane Rehm's panelists are expressing common accord that 80 to 90% of people who have signed up for Obamacare have also made their first payment. In Connecticut, 94% of new enrollees have also paid for their policies. At least 9,500,000 Americans now have health insurance who did not have it belore. In the following article, conservative columnist Marc Theissen would have us believe that Obamacare has accomplished nothing - that every single sign-up only replaces someone who lost their health insurance as a result of Obamacare. Theissen's assertion that "Obamacare has accomplished nothing" is a projection of the shameful fact that the GOP has no healthcare plan whatsoever and that blockage of Medicaid expansion in red states is effectively killing people.

Lots of people.

***

So far 80 to 90 percent of enrollees have paid first premiums, Sebelius says. "Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Monday cited insurance company estimates that say between 80 and 90 percent of those who have selected a plan under ObamaCare have completed the critical final step of making a first premium payment....Experts have estimated that as many as 20 percent of enrollees haven't paid their first month's premium, and Sebelius's comments on Monday are in line or slightly better than those analyses. The administration has said that 6 million people had selected plans through mid-March, meaning that between 600,000 and 1.2 million of those counted as enrollees do not actually have insurance coverage, using Sebelius's estimates.?" Jonathan Easley in The Hill

Obamacare has led to health coverage for millions more people. "President Obama's healthcare law, despite a rocky rollout and determined opposition from critics, already has spurred the largest expansion in health coverage in America in half a century, national surveys and enrollment data show. As the law's initial enrollment period closes, at least 9.5 million previously uninsured people have gained coverage. Some have done so through marketplaces created by the law, some through other private insurance and others through Medicaid, which has expanded under the law in about half the states....Rand has been polling 3,300 Americans monthly about their insurance choices since last fall. Researchers found that the share of adults ages 18 to 64 without health insurance has declined from 20.9% last fall to 16.6% as of March 22. The decrease parallels a similar drop recorded by Gallup, which found in its national polling that the uninsured rate among adults had declined from 18% in the final quarter of last year to 15.9% through the first two months of 2014. Gallup's overall uninsured rate is lower than Rand's because it includes seniors on Medicare." Noam Levey in the Los Angeles Times.

***

"There are two ways of lying, as there are two ways of deceiving customers. If the scale registers 15 ounces, you can say: "It's a pound." Your lie will remain relative to an invariable measure of the true. If customers check it, they can see that they are being robbed, and you know by how much you are robbing them: a truth remains as a judge between you. But if the demon induces you to tamper with the scale itself, it is the criterion of the true which is denatured, there is no longer any possible control. And little by little you will forget that you are cheating."

Denis de Rougemont

***

The Hard Central Fact Of Contemporary Conservatism

The hard, central "fact" of contemporary "conservatism" is its insistence on a socio-economic threshold above which people deserve government assistance, and below which people deserve to die.

The sooner the better.

Unless conservatives are showing n'er-do-wells The Door of Doom, they just don't "feel right."

To allay this chthonic anxiety, they resort to Human Sacrifice, hoping that spilled blood will placate "the angry gods," including the one they've made of themselves. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/harvard-study-45000-americans-die.html

Having poked their eyes out, they fail to see that self-generated wrath creates "the gods" who hold them thrall

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-hard-central-fact-of-contemporary.html

Almost "to a man," contemporary "conservatives" have apotheosized themselves and now -- sitting on God's usurped throne -- are rabid to pass final judgment.

Self-proclaimed Christians, eager to thrust "the undeserving" through The Gates of Hell, are the very people most likely to cross its threshold.

Remarkably, none of them are tempted to believe this.

***

"The Death of Epistemology"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/09/are-polls-skewed-death-of-epistemology.html

***

"Where's The Train Wreck?"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/01/wheres-train-wreck.html

***

Making up good news about Obamacare

By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: March 31, 2014

The Obama administration is celebrating that it has achieved its (downwardly revised) goal of signing up more than 6 million Americans for Obamacare by 11:59 p.m. March 31. Mission accomplished!

Not quite. The administration has not revealed how many of those 6 million people have paid their premiums. If you have not paid, you have not actually “enrolled.” It’s like putting merchandise in your Amazon cart but never clicking “buy.”

Marc A. Thiessen

A fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post.

Archive

Besides, the number that matters is not how many Americans signed up for Obamacare but rather how many previously uninsuredAmericans signed up for Obamacare. By that standard, Obamacare may be headed for an epic failure.

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.

The stated goal of Obamacare was not to move millions of privately insured Americans into taxpayer-subsidized health coverage. The goal was to cover the uninsured. That was the justification for all the chaos and disruption Americans have experienced — and that is the standard by which the administration should be judged.

So how is it doing? We don’t know yet, but the signs are not good. A March survey by McKinsey & Co. found that only 27 percent of consumers who had purchased new coverage in the individual insurance market in February were previously uninsured — up from 11 percent in January. But McKinsey also found that the payment rate for the previously uninsured was just 53 percent, compared with 86 percent for the previously insured. We don’t know how many of those policies were purchased through Obamacare, but remember: Those who sign up and do not pay are not actually enrolled.

Goldman Sachs is projecting that only 1 million Obamacare sign-ups will come from previously uninsured Americans. Indeed, it estimates that the number of total signups will be just 4 million — not 6 million, as the administration claims — because “HHS figures . . .count all persons who selected an ACA exchange plan regardless of whether or not they have actually completed the enrollment process by paying their premium.” Goldman Sachs also anticipates that fully 75 percent of all the Obamacare sign-ups will be from people who already had insurance.

The administration faces a similar problem with Medicaid enrollments. President Obama recently declared, “We’ve got close to 7 million Americans who have access to health care for the first time because of Medicaid expansion.” That statement is flat untrue.

The president assumes that every single one of those Medicaid enrollees is getting health insurance for the first time because of Obamacare. But according to his own Department of Health and Human Services, that number includes people previously enrolled in Medicaid who are deemed eligible for another year, as well as people who would have been eligible under the law before Obamacare. The fact is, HHS does not know how many of the Medicaid signups are “newly eligible” and how many would have signed up anyway. If HHS doesn’t know, how can the president know? The answer is: He can’t.

Over any given six-month period since 2008, between 1.5 million and 2.5 million people have joined the Medicaid rolls just by the natural expansion of the program. Much of that figure, then, is likely just regular Medicaid growth that has nothing to do with Obamacare. Moreover, the health consulting firm Avalere examined the state-by-state numbers and estimates that only 1.1 million to 1.8 million of the claimed enrollees could be attributed to Obamacare. That’s a lot fewer than 7 million.

The Obama administration is so anxious for some good news about this law that if it doesn’t have any, it just makes some up.

There are other problems with Obamacare — coming cancellations of employer-based plans, not having enough young healthy enrollees to play for the old and the sick, skyrocketing deductibles and massive premium hikes despite Obama’s pledge to “cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year.”

But the whole point of Obamacare was supposed to be to cover the uninsured. The president himself set the standard — giving Americans “access to health care for the first time” — by which Obamacare should be judged. So hold him to that standard, and ignore the hyped-up numbers touting how many people “sign up” for Obamacare.

What matters is how many of those who actually enroll were previously uninsured.

Read more from Marc Thiessen’s archive