◼ We've been throwing cold water on the administration's so-called exchange "enrollment" figures for months, and for good reason: They're incomplete to the point of deception. - Guy Benson/Townhall
The Washington Post reported back in November that official tabulations were including anyone who's "selected a plan," which is the equivalent of placing an item in a virtual shopping cart online, regardless of whether the check-out and payment steps ever took place....
The existence of some significant number of duplicate enrollments isn't a surprise to anyone who's been following Obamacare's implementation process. While Healthcare.gov's front end was collapsing over the first few months, many would-be enrollees' sign-ups were sucked into the website's black hole. Unsure about whether any of their information had been transmitted, consumers were encouraged to go though the process again. Some did so multiple times. The screenshot in that tweet comes from a report prepared by America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) for Congress. It confirms that "many" of the sign-ups being celebrated as "enrollments" are in fact various iterations of the same person's enrollment efforts. Phil asks "how do you not even [de-duplicate]?" The answer is pretty straightforward: The online "reconciliation" system that would perform this Herculean task through automation is still under construction -- and may not be ready for months (beyond the eight months that have already elapsed). That's why the administration's enrollment statistics are useless in the aggregate. They just manufactured the largest-sounding number possible and heralded it as exciting proof that the "law is working" and the "debate is over."
...We've seen fresh warning signs of the bad news yet to come: Additional cancellation notices and major premium increases, disproportionately impacting consumers in the small group market. The Las Vegas Review-Journal story offered a stark reminder of what's on tap, but again, none of it is a surprise.
