Obamacare: Fewer than 10 percent of states' goals have been met

Published December 21, 2013

Editorial by Chicago Tribune, December 19, 2013.

Attention, last-minute insurance shoppers: There are only four days before P-Day, Dec. 23. That's the deadline for choosing a plan on an Obamacare insurance exchange to ensure that coverage begins on Jan. 1.

If you're scrambling to make last-minute arrangements, or waiting to hear if your insurer has actually received and approved your application, we know this is not your fault. For weeks, the government's HealthCare.gov website repelled customers with the brutal efficiency of a nightclub bouncer. Even if you thought you completed the process, chances were good that your application information wasn't accurately sent to insurers.

If you're among the millions who had their individual policies canceled because of Obamacare, you may still be confused about the conditions under which your insurer will extend those policies and at what cost.

Last week, federal officials piled on more confusion when they urged insurers to relax coverage rules. The feds asked companies to cover people even if they miss the Jan. 1 deadline to pay their premium. On Wednesday, most insurers agreed to grant customers a grace period until Jan. 10 to pay premiums. The feds also pushed insurers to refill prescriptions in January, even if those pills aren't covered under the new plan. And they prodded insurers to treat out-of-network doctors as in-network under some emergency circumstances. Our analysis: Huh?

You think the Obamacare run-up to Jan. 1 has been a train wreck? Now it gets worse.

You'll soon be hearing more stories of people who thought they'd signed up for coverage, only to find that their paperwork was gobbled by computer gremlins. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services officials said they've whittled down the error rate in enrollment data sent to insurers from an astronomical 1 in 10 to "close to zero."

But insurers say they are still finding errors and the government is overstating improvements to HealthCare.gov, The New York Times reported. In some cases, for instance, the home address for a new policy holder was outside the insurer's service area. Or a child was listed as the main subscriber — the person on the hook for premiums — with parents listed as dependents. Or people were listed two or three times on an application, which could mean higher premium payments.

Looming question: How many people have gained coverage versus those who have lost it? No one knows — yet. HHS is fond of boasting of rising numbers of people who have signed up for coverage, but officials don't keep track of how many have paid premiums to start coverage.

One thing is certain: Most states lag behind in their Obamacare sign-up goals. The National Review Online reported this week that 45 states haven't yet hit 10 percent — 10! — of their enrollment goals. In Illinois, a paltry 7,043 people have signed up, hardly a dent in the state's goal of 300,000 by the end of March.

Just as important: Who's signing up? Insurers need droves of young healthy people to pay premiums that offset all the money pouring out to cover older, sicker people. The administration hopes that 4 in 10 new enrollees will be age 18 to 34. Preliminary numbers don't look promising. In some states, a paltry 1 out of 5 new enrollees fall in that age range.

Many young, healthy people aren't buying the Obamacare pitch, according to a recent Harvard University Institute of Politics poll. Of respondents who were not insured, more than 1 in 4 said they would definitely or probably not enroll. About the same number said they would. The rest were on the fence.

Ominous development for Obamacare's future: The survey found that only 18 percent of those young people polled believe their quality of health care will improve under Obamacare while 40 percent believe it will grow worse. Another body blow: By a ratio of 5 to 1, those polled believe their costs will increase.

Many of those young people who don't enroll will pay mild penalties rather than steep premiums and deductibles. Perfectly legal. And perfectly lethal for Obamacare: Premiums rise, more people bail, subsidies soak taxpayers and the whole system tilts into insolvency.

But that comes later. For now, "the big moment of truth is 12 a.m. Jan 1, when a mother is standing at a pharmacy with a baby in her arms trying to get a script filled," Aetna Inc. CEO Mark Bertolini told The Wall Street Journal.

Happy New Year! We hope.

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December 21, 2013 at 9:12 am
jack dawsey says:

Obamacare is indeed complex and difficult. Programs, government or private, of its magnitude generally experience many unintended consequences until they are tweaked-out by responsible democrats and republicans. (By the way, in the opinion of this writer, there are few responsible democrats in Congress, and fewer still responsible republicans).

Doubtless, the 36 republican states in the union without exchanges make Obamacare 36-times more difficult to implement. You know what that means? With respect to getting medical insurance, it means the poorest of the poor have 36 more obstacles in their way than you or I. Deprivation, put down, stomp on them, make life harder, screw them now that's a legacy for republican Christians to boast and crow about this time of the year, isn't it?

December 21, 2013 at 2:36 pm
Norm Kelly says:

So the DemocRAT plan forcing millions of people off their existing health insurance plans, while perhaps only thousands are signing up for Obamacare, and you have the audacity to point the finger of blame on Republicans? Talk about drinking kool-aid.

Please, do something no Demoncrat in Washington has been willing to do. Tell us where in the world socialized medicine has worked. And when you find that one place, please tell us why you believe it will succeed here. (i won't hold my breath waiting for you to find that one place: it doesn't exist.)

Once again, the King has changed his mind on how his plan is to be implemented. He is trying to force the insurance companies and the country into bankruptcy. Your response completely ignores this and throws blame on Republicans? When Republicans tried to stop socialized medicine part 1, did you support them? Since you believe there are still some Dems in Washington that are responsible, please list this person. Cuz there's no way that even a die-hard lib could come up with more than 1. I'm not saying there's a lot of Republicans, but there are some. Cruz, Ryan, Paul, come to mind immediately. Which Demon is it that you were thinking of as being responsible?

Did you buy the lie about keeping your current private pay insurance policy? If the majority of people who sign up for socialized medicine part 1 are either free on medicaid or subsidized by us taxpayers, how exactly does this work? Who ends up paying for this? How does the already bankrupt federal government pay for this?

I don't like politicians, like Hagan, Pelosi, Reid, D Price, and Jean Shaheen, who keep their heads in the sand. I have very little respect for politicians who lie. See previous list and include His High Holiness, the Anonited One. (note: the reference to 'his high holiness' was not a reference to the way he spent his days in high school and college.)

Current review of this idiotic law shows that millions more who get their insurance through their employer will start being kicked off sometime around the end of 2014. Will you still buy this idea at that point? If so, how bad does it have to get before you'll cry uncle? How bad before you agree that it's a complete failure? When the central planners decide that part 1 has failed, and their solution is a complete take-over of the entire medical industry, will you support that also? What part of 'efficient federal government' gives you hope that they can take over 1/6 of the national economy and not screw it up? Even a die-hard lib would have to admit that the central planners' only solution to a messed up Obamacare is going to be this complete take over. They haven't ever yet said that is was too much central planner involvement in a program that has screwed it up. Their response ALWAYS is that not enough central planner involvement is the cause of the problems with the program. They always blame the Republicans for preventing them from implementing their socialist ideas properly, and the only way to 'fix it' is to override the Republicans and force socialism onto the failing 'business'. And they have shown that they are willing to change the rules in order to eliminate Republican objections.