A few weeks ago, the Feds trotted out a statistic aimed to bolster support for the fledgling Obamacare legislation. While many Obamacare exchange groups have discontinued coverage or announced double-digit premium rate hikes, federal officials announced that the uninsured rate is now below 10% in the first time in history.
What the Obama Administration failed to announce and Wall Street Journal writer Louise Radnofsky did not know or mention, is that a reduction from 16% to 9.1% falls below what the predicted success claims were supposed to be. Obamacare was written and executed on the premise that the uninsured would fall to 5%, which was supposed to be justification for implementing such an onerous, convoluted, expansive law.
Now, six years later, we can add the 9.1% statistic to the pile of other Obamacare stats that missed their targets repeatedly; By this time, “the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that President Obama’s centerpiece legislation would result in an average of 201 million people having private health insurance in any given month of 2016. Now that 2016 is here, the CBO says that just 177 million people, on average, will have private health insurance in any given month of this year—a shortfall of 24 million people.
Additionally, the CBO has significantly altered its estimates for what 2016 would have looked like if Obamacare had never been passed. In 2013, the CBO projected that, in the absence of Obamacare, 186 million people would have had private health insurance in 2016, and 34 million people would have been on Medicaid or CHIP. The CBO now maintains that, in the absence of Obamacare, only 168 million people would have had private health insurance in 2016 (a reduction of 18 million people from its 2013 projection), while 55 million people would have been on Medicaid or CHIP (an increase of 21 million people from its 2013 projection). Somehow the hypothetical non-Obamacare world has changed between 2013 and 2016 projections. (The CBO doesn’t explain how this could have happened.)”
We don’t need to be celebrating these hollow victories. We need to be relentlessly reminding the electorate that this monstrosity, crafted and voted on by our Democrat Senators, has been one enormous failure after another — administratively and financially.