Looks like a fourth of the people who signed up for ObamaCare plans in the winter have lost or decided not to continue their coverage. The Washington Post reports:
Nearly 1 in 4 of the Americans who picked a health plan this year through the Affordable Care Act’s insurance marketplaces have dropped or lost their coverage, according to new federal data.
A report, released Tuesday by federal health officials, shows that 9.9 million people were paying, as of the end of June, for health plans they had gotten through the federal and state-run insurance exchanges created under the health-care law.
Those people reflect a decline from the roughly 12.7 million consumers who signed up for a 2015 health plan. The vast majority signed up during an open enrollment period that ended in February and the rest through special enrollment circumstances since then.
Some of these people just signed up and never paid the premium, while others paid for a while and then stopped. Why? Powerline suggests several reasons:
Some may have stopped because they (or their spouse) got a job that provided health insurance or they became eligible for Medicaid. But it seems likely that the vast majority stopped paying (or never paid) because they didn’t want to pay. Sharp increases in some premiums likely contributed to this desire.
Here’s another factor that contributed to the decline. In more than 400,000 cases, federal health officials cut off coverage to people because they did not provide proof that their citizenship or naturalization status made them eligible for Obamacare.
The current figures indicate that the estimates by analysts that twenty-one million will have ObamaCare policies next year are wildly optimistic.
And Powerline notes something that makes even the paltry 9.9 million number less meaningful that it might appear at first glance:
Finally, we should keep in mind that the 9.9 million figure for those who have health insurance through Obamacare exchanges doesn’t represent the number of people who would not have non-Medicaid insurance in the absence of Obamacare.
Many Americans lost their employer-based coverage due to Obamacare. So the number of Americans who have non-Medicaid health insurance thanks to Obamacare, though substantial, is considerably lower than 9.9 million.
The passage of the ObamaCare legislation, with all the unsavory deals and exotic parliamentary maneuvers this required, and subsequent implementation through a botched launch were traumatic for the country.
And for what? These numbers do not justify the pain of creating a system that was not popular in the beginning and remains unpopular today.