February Obamacare figures fuel uncertainty
Megan McArdle, Bloomberg: “By the beginning of (March), 4.2 million people had selected a plan. ... It’s not a completely awful report: Enrollment seems to have held steady at roughly its January pace. However, it was supposed to accelerate. Even more worrying is the lack of significant improvement in the demographics. Unless we get a huge rush of young people signing up at the last moment ... the insurance pool is going to be much older than expected.” Jon Terbush, The Week: “Among the enrollees, 25% are in the crucial 18- to 34-year-old age bracket, a percentage that rose in February and is expected to rise once again this month as young procrastinators finally get around to picking insurance plans. Meaning, that dreaded death spiral ... is even less likely to happen. And importantly for supporters of the health care law, the ballooning enrollment figures will make it that much harder for GOP critics to keep championing an Obamacare repeal.” Guy Benson, Town Hall: “The ‘official’ numbers should be accompanied (with) a large asterisk because the administration tabulates ‘selected plans’ as ‘enrollments.’ This means that if someone places an Obamacare plan in a virtual shopping cart but never checks out or pays, that act somehow ‘counts’ as an enrollment.” Sy Mukherjee, Think Progress: “Critics are likely to point out that the Congressional Budget Office and other indepen- dent organizations have projected that approximately 40% of Affordable Care Act enrollees will have to be relatively young in order for the marketplaces to function effectively — but that’s not exactly the case. Insurance actuaries told the Commonwealth Fund last month that health status is a far more important metric for determining how expensive and stable Obamacare’s risk pools will be.” Jon Healey, Los Angeles Times: “President Obama appeared Tuesday in an episode of Between Two Ferns With Zach Galifianakis. ... He specifically reached out in the video to ‘young invincibles’ — young people who ‘don’t think that they can get hurt’ as Obama put it — to sign up (for Obamacare). I couldn’t help thinking that I was laughing at Obama, not Galifianakis. If Obama knew what he was getting into, then kudos to him for being much, much edgier than the average commander in chief.”