No News Is Bad News

Megan McArdle does make at least one good point in this article questioning whether the PPACA is actually an improvement over the status quo ante. If the news about enrollments were good, we’d undoubtedly be hearing a lot more about it:

If I’d sketched out the current scenario last summer — computer systems don’t work for months, millions lose insurance, and by the beginning of December, only 1.2 million people have picked up coverage from the exchanges and Medicare combined — the law’s supporters would have rolled their eyes and shaken their heads at the wishful thinking of the law’s critics. And now they generally assume that it will of course get better — that by March 31, if not sooner, we will see a measurable and substantial reduction in the number of uninsured.

But while that’s certainly very possible, it doesn’t exactly seem inevitable. To be sure, I myself find it hard to believe that the number of uninsured people will actually rise, even temporarily, as a result of the law. On the other hand, the administration has been pretty quick to leak whenever they had good enrollment numbers, and we haven’t heard a peep since the beginning of the month. So however incredible, it’s at least a real possibility that we’ll see a net decline in coverage on Jan. 1 — or even on April 1.

The administration hasn’t exactly been shy or secretive heretofore about good news.

Another point: the individual insurance market isn’t composed of one big pool even under the PPACA. It’s composed of a lot of little ones and the risk profile in individual pools might well be impossible to sustain. So it’s not just the risk profile of the nationwide enrollment that’s important. It’s also how those risks are distributed within individual plans.