They had better hope that this is not typical:
WILMINGTON, Del. — More than a month after the launch of Delaware’s health insurance exchange, officials report only four Delawareans enrolled for insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
As of Wednesday, Delaware’s marketplace guide organizations reported four enrollments, 31 enrollment applications completed and 218 accounts created for possible enrollment.
This would probably be a good time for me to repeat the back-of-the-envelope calculation I made a month ago. To enroll 7 million people in the exchanges, the number projected by the CBO, over a period of 200 days requires that 35,000 people be successfully enrolled per day. If you move the deadline up to, say, the end of February 2014, a more practical date, it’s more than 45,000 people successfully enrolled per day. If you move the deadline up to the end of 2013, the date required for technical compliance, more than 75,000 people must be successfully enrolled per day.
If the total number of enrollments is measured in the dozens or even the hundreds or thousands, reaching the 7 million number by the end of the year will require an enormous flood of enrollments between now and the end of the year. Keep that in mind when you hear administration officials quoting statistics about Healthcare.gov’s capacity.
It will be interesting to see what numbers they give us next week.
It will be interesting to see what numbers they give us next week.
It would be more interesting to know if they gave us the correct numbers next week. Or even if they know what that number is.
For academic purposes, consider how different the rollout of this series of websites has been from the Manhattan Project. The question that presents itself is: When did the country’s elite stop caring about governing and competence?
I think it was in the mid to late 60s, early 70s. It’s not that they stopped caring. It’s that for the first time there was real money in rent-seeking and the feeding frenzy took over.
N
No, I do think they’ve stopped caring. Is there any indication that the Obama Administration is seriously concerned that they’re failing on ObamaCare delivery, as opposed to the notion that they’re concerned this looks bad politically?
Is there any indication Democrats in Congress care that this has been done so poorly, as opposed to the notion that this looks bad politically? (I heard, but haven’t looked it up myself, that Pelosi has even said the rollout has been a great success.)
Is there any indication that Republicans in Congress care that this has been done so poorly, as opposed to the notion that this looks good for them politically?
Is there any indication that the big proxy voices in the media care that this is a failure, as opposed to how they will spin this to their side’s benefit? There has been some hand-wringing on the liberal side, but at worst they’re throwing a lame duck President under the bus to preserve the rest of the party.
I hear a lot of noise, but I’m not seeing anyone showing a desire to fix anything. Because at this late date even suspending the individual mandate for a year has all kinds of bad risks, unless I’m completely misunderstanding how this thing is supposed to work.
As I stated the other day, to me it increasingly looks like the political class just assumes that nameless, faceless subordinates will do the governing while they go about the merry business of fund-raising and running for the next election.