Two Years After the Thanksgiving Obamacare Ad, Still Not Much to Be Thankful For

Brittany M. Hughes | November 23, 2015
DONATE
Font Size



It’s been two years since President Obama’s head cheerleading squad over at Organizing for America rolled out their Thanksgiving-themed Obamacare ad, and things still aren’t looking too festive for the federal insurance marketplace.

Anyone remember this borderline creepy commercial from 2013? We're still trying to forget.


O.K., Organizing for America -- let's have the talk. Because with enrollment numbers falling far short of projections, state exchanges going bankrupt, insurance companies backing out amid plummeting profits and Americans’ insurance prices creeping ever higher, Obamacare still hasn’t given many people much to be thankful for.

A recent Forbes article broke down the bottom-line numbers, explaining that the president’s signature health care program still isn’t bringing in the spectacular enrollment numbers the Congressional Budget Office projected back when Obamacare was first signed into law in 2010:

Every time it’s researched, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and others are lowering their enrollment numbers and projections. For example, at one point CBO thought 14 million people would be enrolled in Obamacare plans in 2015. It turns out that number should be closer to 9.5 million.

It gets even worse. Of those 9.5 million, fewer than 2 million will enroll without need for the refundable tax credit premium subsidy. That means that Obamacare is quickly turning into a Medicaid expansion, combined with very expensive “bridge” health insurance for the working poor and lower middle class.

George Mason University’s Mercatus Center also ran the numbers, and found the following:

Projections constructed in 2010 by both the federal government and private research organizations overestimated 2014 and 2015 health insurance exchange enrollment by several million people. Those estimates also projected about 10 million more exchange enrollees for 2016 than is now widely predicted.

The report continued:

When the ACA was signed into law in March 2010, most experts and economic models projected that the ACA’s individual mandate provision, along with the new subsidies, would induce enough relatively healthy people to enroll in an ACA plan to produce a stable risk pool.

…Early data, however, show that insurers have enrolled a disproportionate number of older and sicker people. Despite an $8 billion subsidy through a reinsurance program to pay the majority of the expenses for high-cost ACA plan enrollees, insurers’ 2014 losses on ACA plans equaled about 12 percent of the premiums collected. Of the 23 healthcare cooperatives (co-ops) that were initiated with ACA start-up loans, 12 have already gone out of business or are shutting down at the end of 2015 because of massive losses from ACA plans. Part of the reason for a worse-than expected risk pool is that the individual mandate appears to be leading fewer relatively healthy people to enroll than was expected.

Businesss on the Obamacare marketplace is so bad, in fact, that UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest health insurance provider, just announced it may drop out of the exchange altogether by 2017 due to falling profits, saying they’ve already lost nearly half a billion dollars selling insurance plans on the government marketplace. The company is already scaling back its marketing for plans offered in the exchanges to keep new enrollees from signing up.



As of last July, five of the 13 states that had set up their own state-run exchanges had already shut down their marketplaces over funding deficiencies, including Obama’s home state of Hawaii. According to the federal law, state exchanges that can’t support their own weight get absorbed into the larger federal exchange – which should be fun, considering Health and Human Services is already telling insurers it will “explore other sources of funding” for the federal marketplace to make up for continuing shortfalls in 2016.

And for those Americans who do get their insurance through the federal exchange, it looks like their costs are set to increase for the third straight year in a row – particularly for those who make too much money to qualify for federal health care subsidies, but don’t make enough to pay Obamacare’s hefty fine for not having insurance.

With numbers like these, we'll just pass the cranberry sauce -- and pass on government healthcare.

donate