About Those Obamacare “Successes”

Federal statistics can be easily manipulated to suit the present needs of the bureaucrats who need a certain story to be told. Imagine announcing that you’re on a diet and you gain five pounds in the first month. In an effort to save face, you simply ignore any weight you gained up to age twenty when telling other people where you’re currently at. 

That’s the federal way. 

When the numbers can’t be manipulated through mere accounting trickery, they can just be inflated through sheer confusion.

Enrollment in Medicaid spiked in December, aided by Obamacare exchanges and an expansion of the government-run health coverage program for the poor in 25 states.

But it was far from clear just how many of the Medicaid enrollees are new people drawn by Affordable Care Act-related initiatives, as opposed to re-enrollments, according to a leading health-care analyst who called the data released Wednesday “confusing.”

By the end of December, more than 6.3 million people were determined to be eligible for Medicaid or CHIP, the program covering children, through state-run agencies and state-based Obamacare exchanges, according to a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services report released Wednesday.

That tally does not include the 750,000 or so people who were determined eligible in Medicaid through the federally-run Obamacare exchange HealthCare.gov.

Adding the two enrollment numbers together equals more than 7 million Medicaid-eligible determinations. But some of the determinations made by HealthCare.gov may be duplicative of state-based decisions.

Such is the state of “success” for the PPACA thus far. 

Reuters suggests that some of the Medicaid numbers probably include people who happened to find out they qualified even before the law expanded eligibility

An expansion of Medicaid didn’t require a complete overhaul of an industry however. We were told that was necessary to get the in-between people insured. This was what the public demanded, according to Obamacare apologists/champions. Certainly there would be a rush by these people to enroll once the tech glitches were partially resolved, right? 

Not so much

So…what if they gave an industry a crippling makeover and nobody came? 

Meanwhile, the hits just keep coming one after another

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