It’s being reported that 476,000 people have applied for insurance either through the state-run exchanges or the federal government’s Healthcare.gov since the enrollment period began on October 1:
Administration officials say more than 476,000 health insurance applications have been filed through federal and state exchanges. The figures mark the most detailed measure yet of the problem-plagued rollout of the insurance market place.
However, the officials continue to refuse to say how many people have actually enrolled in the insurance markets. And without enrollment figures, it’s unclear whether the program is on track to reach the 7 million people projected by the Congressional Budget Office to gain coverage during the six-month sign-up period.
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Of the 476,000 applications that have been started, just over half have been from the 36 states where the federal government is taking the lead in running the markets. The rest of the applications have come from the 14 states running their own markets, along with Washington, D.C.
Politico looks at the number in somewhat more detail:
The Associated Press, which first reported the creation of 476,000 applications Saturday, said the numbers were roughly divided between people who had managed to create accounts on the HealthCare.gov federal site, which is serving 36 states, and the state-run exchanges. Neither White House nor HHS officials would give any further details or breakdown Saturday evening.
Several of the state exchanges, such as Kentucky and Washington state, are operating fairly smoothly. Some are still having problems, but overall the state-based systems are working better than the massive federal one. The health law as written in 2010 assumed that the states would run their own exchanges, with the feds only available as a backup. But many states, mostly with GOP governors, opted out, forcing HHS to build a far more massive and extensive enrollment system than it had contemplated, and Congress rejected several requests for additional implementation funds.
The Advisory Board, a business group that tracks health industry developments, tallied up the state figures available as of Friday and found that about 192,000 people had applied, and roughly 55,000 had selected a health plan (although not all of them had paid in advance for the plan, so technically enrollment wasn’t completed).
Also left unanswered is how many of those just under half million are actual potential healthcare insurance exchange customers and how many are eligible for Medicaid. In the final analysis there are only three numbers that matter: how many people are insured under the exchanges, what percentage of them are young and healthy, and what percentage of those insured under the exchanges were previously uninsured.
It’s kind of telling that no one has posted on this thread yet. However, what is there to be said about that 476,000 number anyway?
It’s just an undefined figure with no way of knowing how accurate it is, what fraction of that number actually signed up, what duplications were among that number, how many relatively healthy people were part of the sum noted as applying…and so on.
Basically, such a blanket number is no more useful than being a placeholder or ‘symbol,’ which the Obama administration frequently resorts to in telegraphing it’s messages to the public. More often than not, a backdrop of people are Obama’s most beguiling symbols — small children for gun control, or doctors in white coats to demonstrate how the medical profession is squarely behind the PPACA.
This morning, it was more of the same as the president, talking at a pep rally type Rose Garden function, was formally introduced first by a successful enrollee, a woman from Delaware. It was yet another people visual employed to dispel growing urban myth stories, generated by the inability to find someone who had gotten through the computer maze and legitimately signed- up More and more, though, these human optics seem theatrically arranged and disingenuous, because, when a program is truly sound, having genuine merit to it, why the need for gimmicks and over-sell?
Elaborating more on Obama’s morning “Rah, Rah, enroll in Obamacare” routine: There were 13 people standing behind him, as human endorsements of signing-up for Obamacare. The inference was that they were exhibitions of the ‘lucky ones.’ However, apparently only 3 of the 13 actually have enrolled. The woman who seem sick, standing behind Obama, came all the way from San Diego, for this appearance. Why? And, how did that happen??? And, the woman introducing Obama, Janice Baker from Delaware, apparently is the only one to have done so from her state, thus far. It’s ridiculous how Obama is using morsels and then magnifying their relevance to stretch (I would call distort) his points.
Finally, a state-by-state analysis of how this law is effecting HC premiums is showing that 45 states have reported higher premiums — some being 100% or more.