Another “happy” graph showing the reduced numbers of the uninsured hailed in HHS’ announcement that 14.1 million adults have “gained health insurance coverage since…October, 2013.” Buying it?
Let’s see, last week I discussed and CITED TEXT from the Congressional Budget Office Publication 49973 which said that calculations will now be based BY THE GOVERNMENT as “…somewhat fewer people are now projected to gain insurance coverage because of the ACA, because CBO and JCT estimate that fewer people would be uninsured in the absence of the ACA…” (Pub. 49973 page 22), http://conoutofconsumer.blogspot.com/2015/03/turns-out-number-of-uninsured-was.html.
So, the Government Lowered the Number of Uninsured to Raise the Percentage of those who Gained Insurance: We do get that right? Lowering the number of uninsured in the first place RAISES the percentage of newly insured even if a “REAL” number was possible. For example, if there were 14 million newly insured of the 47 million people we were originally told were uninsured would be (rounding up) 30 percent. 14 million of 45 million, a mere two million lower would up the percentage to 31 percent.
And, did you notice? There is NO ACCURACY in who is NEWLY INSURED, we don’t know who was already insured before Obamacare and who wasn’t, there is NO number, simply the floating estimate. Signups for Obamacare have always relied on GUESTIMATES of who is newly insured. Those numbers would be useful before proclaiming SUCCESS as opposed to people switching from one plan to an Obamacare plan.
And let’s not forget the impact of expanded Medicaid which could have been accomplished without the rest of the 1,000 pages of Obamacare and obviously would reduce the uninsured by providing a near free option for health insurance that requires little to no payment for care.
It’s an idiotic way to assert good news because there is no CONCRETE information conveyed by CMS and for the rest of us, Obamacare is not a religion, we don’t operate on faith. It’s nice HHS believes they’re doing a bang-up job and that 14.1 million people have “gained” insurance but it’s only nice since there’s no way to tell what numbers we started out with or what numbers have actually been achieved.
We’re smarter than this, aren’t we?
