Obama supporters cite the 30 million who stand eventually to gain health insurance coverage as the most compelling reason for not abandoning ObamaCare in its time of troubles. Despite a string of disappointments and broken promises, ObamaCare critics do not push back against this claim. After all, the 30 million who will gain insurance is a calculation of the “non-partisan” CBO.
In actuality, the 30 million figure is the CBO’s projected difference between the numbers of uninsured without and with ObamaCare in various years in the future. Given the current state of flux of our health insurance system, anyone who claims to know these figures is either a liar or a fool.
We do have at least two projections of the number of uninsured under the implementation of ObamaCare. They basically agree. The more widely publicized is the CBO’s projection of 26 million uninsured in Obama’s last year in office. A more recent independent study estimates 30 million uninsured at the end of Obama’s second term, and finds, remarkably, that the uninsured will have the same features (poor, Hispanic, young) as before ObamaCare. And I thought the primary goal of ObamaCare was to insure everyone, not to leave close to 30 million uninsured behind!
These two projections raise the question: How can ObamaCare raise the number of insured by 30 million as it leaves some 30 million uninsured?
Reconciling such inconsistencies is not a new challenge for the Obama team. If they could find millions of jobs “saved” by the stimulus as actual jobs were shrinking, they can find millions “saved” from not being insured in the absence of ObamaCare. It is as easy to save people from virtual uninsurance as to save virtual jobs.
To calculate virtual insurance, the CBO (Table 3) estimates the number of uninsured with and without ObamaCare through 2022. They conclude that the same number (56 million) would be uninsured in 2016 as before ObamaCare. (I wonder why the CBO does not use Obama’s 41 million uninsured figure — which includes “unauthorized aliens” — as its starting point?)
Per CBO we’d have 56 million uninsured without ObamaCare in the year the President leaves office.
To complete its virtual insurance calculation, the CBO estimates that, by 2016, an additional 31 million more will gain insurance (20 million from the new exchanges and 17 million from Medicaid expansion) than will lose coverage (4 million from employers and 2 million from individual markets). This is the source of the 30 million people that ObamaCare will save from being uninsured.
The CBO’s calculation of virtual insurance is like measuring weight loss by subtracting your actual weight at the end of a diet from what it would have been without the diet. For example, a 200 pound man weighs 195 pounds after a month of dieting. He concludes he lost 25 pounds because he figures he would have weighed 225 pounds without the diet.
Note the CBO “saves” us from being uninsured by assuming that 20 million Americans will be rushing to the exchanges in 2016 despite high premiums and even higher deductibles and that only 2.5 percent of employers stop offering employee coverage and only 7 percent lose their insurance in individual markets.
Although the exchange sign-up numbers have yet to be disclosed, our initial first-hand experience with the exchanges seems to be that they reduce the number of insured. The number of individual policies cancelled may turn out to be greater than the number turning to exchanges and Medicaid. The employer mandate has been delayed a year. How companies will respond is only a matter of speculation, but if only a quarter decides not to offer insurance, ObamaCare will actually raise the number uninsured, according to the CBO formula.
The lesson: Never accept any projection of what will happen in the future without first reading the fine print. I can apply equally plausible assumptions to the CBO calculations to conclude that ObamaCare will raise the number uninsured.
Politicians have learned to pick a number that makes their case, repeat it over and over until the public accepts it as true. The “repeated lie” tactic works as long as it does not contradict what ordinary people see with their own eyes. Obama’s “millions of jobs saved” became a national joke as jobs continued to disappear. ObamaCare’s virtual insurance will suffer the same ignominy if people see the actual insurance rolls falling, while the administration claims otherwise due to virtual insurance gains. The public could care less what the insurance rolls would have been if there were no ObamaCare.