The Daily Caller (TheDC), a website run by Fox News supplicant Tucker Carlson, has published what they laughably refer to as an “investigation” into “the numbers on the hilariously sad failure of Obamacare.” Unfortunately for them, what ends up being hilariously sad is their inept attempt to malign a program that is showing objective signs of success and is gaining in popularity.
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TheDC based their article on reports of the Obama administration’s estimates that about half a million people would enroll in the ObamaCare exchanges in the first month. However, the launch of the online component of the program was something less than optimal, to put it mildly. As a result, enrollment was severely hampered.
It is was on this basis that TheDC concluded that ObamaCare has failed. But their own numbers tell a different story. TheDC cites an analysis by Millward Brown Digital, a private marketing firm, who estimate that 36,000 people enrolled in a new health care plan on the federal exchange in the first week. And according to an article in The Atlantic, an additional 115,000 enrolled via the the state exchanges. That’s about 150,000 enrollees in the first week, despite the software glitches. Extrapolate that number out for 50 more weeks, or one full year, and you get 7.5 million. The Department of Health and Human Services estimated that they would enroll seven million people the first year. Therefore, these numbers suggest that they will exceed their estimates.
Of course there are stipulations that need to be addressed. For one thing, there is an open enrollment period that only goes through March of 2014, so consumers cannot enroll from April to October of next year. However, it also needs to be considered that, absent the glitches, many more people would have already enrolled. It is highly likely that when the system is more stable enrollments will increase exponentially, not only due to the system’s availability, but to the demand for high quality, low cost insurance. In fact, information published by The Atlantic, but ignored by The DC who used the article as their source, shows that where the exchanges where functional, public response was quite positive:
“[T]he data suggests what must be a welcome proof of concept for the exchanges. The demand is there and people are completing applications through the marketplaces at a solid clip where it’s possible for them to do so.”
Also not reported in TheDC’s investigation is that, while only 36,000 were reported to have enrolled, there were over nine million visitors to Healthcare.gov in the first week, and over a million of them completed registrations. A completed registration is the best indication of an intention to enroll at a later date. A more complete reporting of the Millward Brown Digital study that TheDC excerpted reveals a far more optimistic appraisal of the program. And as confirmation of that, week two enrollments increased 31 percent.
So even using the TheDC’s numbers, which were significantly reduced due to technical problems, ObamaCare appears well on its way to success. The “sad failure” hoped for by TheDC and the rest of the right-wing opponents of Americans having access to health care is clearly not going to materialize. So in order to distract from that fact, TheDC chose to flesh out their phony investigation with ridiculous comparisons to other online subscription services, beginning with a bondage and sadomasochism site. The sexual fetishism of TheDC’s reporting continued with other comparisons to sites about boobs and sugar daddies.
However, all of the comparisons mentioned by theDC were not only childish, they were irrelevant. Subscriptions to online services that have been available for years, particularly those with sexual content, cannot be reasonably compared to a brand new government site offering health insurance coverage that has only been online for two weeks.
In another example of the right-wing media’s dishonesty, last Friday Fox News aired an episode of Sean Hannity’s program that included three couples who, according to Hannity, were “feeling the pain of Obamacare and the healthcare overhaul train wreck.” However, when an aide to the former governor of Montana contacted these alleged victims, what he discovered was that not a single one of them had even bothered to look at the insurance exchange to ascertain whether or not they would be helped or harmed. In every case, as it turns out, they would have paid thousands less annually in premiums. They were simply blindly opposed to ObamaCare without any direct knowledge of it, and that’s certainly why Hannity chose them to appear on his show. This is typical of the dimwitted and deceitful brand of journalism practiced by conservative media in general, and by Fox News and TheDC in particular.
[Note: The Fox News community website and Fib Factory, Fox Nation, featured TheDC’s story as their top headline news item on both Friday and Saturday]
In the end, what’s really hilariously sad is a pseudo-journalist who once said that Fox News is “a mean, sick group of people,” but now is reduced to working for them and regurgitating their flagrant falsehoods and propaganda.
[Update] News reports now reveal that the ObamaCare exchanges have received 476,000 applications in the first two weeks. That’s just shy of the half million that the administration had estimated. And before anyone tries to dismiss this as liberal media trickery, the news outlet reporting this is Fox News.
I have a true story about the failure of the Marketplace. It gives failure a whole new meaning. For me the Marketplace means a 225% increase in my premiums for a high deductible plan.And the competence of the Marketplace staff rivals nothing I have ever experienced. After numerous hours on the website and at least six futile phone calls, I asked a rep if there was any question that I could ask her that she might be able to answer about the Marketplace. There was dead silence on the phone. Maybe you feel these guys at Fox are reporting falsely but I can assure you every painful moment of my experience is true. I have documented it and according to the reps at the Marketplace they have too.
Assuming your story is true, it is just one anecdotal, unfortunate experience and doesn’t negate thousands of positive experiences. Since the program does so much good and helps so many Americans who never had access to health care before, it would be idiotic to repeal ObamaCare because of situations like yours. The proper response would be to continue the things it does well and fix the flaws. Hopefully Congress will do that and your situation will be corrected.
Leave it to Fox to spin something good as bad. They simply are taking something that is good(150,000 enrollees)and saying it is bad when in actuality it is good. They can claim they are stating a truthful fact(150,000 enrollees) and that is bad, when any critical reasoning would conclude otherwise. This is how Fox operates all the time-totally dishonestly.
Like Congress I’m going on vacation,but before I go I have to say this on the ACA aka Obama-care, the shutdown and the GOP/FOX/Rightwing Nuts: Having all the attributes of low-functioning sociopaths… to a man/women they discharge with abandon platitudes like Freedom, America, Family, Patriot, and Values and do so with projectile speed and an indiscriminate-dispersal (while having no thought, genuine feeling-invested or understanding of the sacrosanct concepts in question)! For them the medium in which they swim is Hate Radio, paranoia and conspiracy (and the more fantastic the more readily transmitted like some horrible contagion). These are Reactionaries who rather than being for someone or something are for reasons of raw unflinching pathological self-interest against everyone… “not them”! They live in a world free-of-facts, where history is to be revised (accordingly) and the only voices they hear are their own self-reinforcing feverish rants!
This necrotizing-vestige and fading shadow of what was formerly the establishment party of Reagan have now made of what was once the call and privilege of Public Service nothing more then a “reductive pursuit” and one intent on serving ever narrowing-interests and the illusion of purity. Never to be dirtied by the hard work-of-governance or a need to actually have the capacity of compassion… these craven, puerile, destructive, intellectually-lazy, full-on nihilist “place holders’ see both compromise and reasonable accommodation as the failings of capitulation and strive only to circumvent good-order, to-impede, slow-down and if allowed flat-line the progress of the entire nation.
They reject the very structures of our democracy, its intended healthy-tension, civility, discourse, debate and unity-of-purposes (no loyal opposition here). They brandish mini-constitutions like fetishes and all the while working to undo all that this “living” document has allowed us to achieve and the very society which has raised up around it (yes… they will save us by wounding, maiming, crippling and killing us)! For them their moral-universe extends no further then their petty concerns will take them… and even to a place where the theft of power by extortion is just another day’s work!
If they cannot re-litigate a law “already” duly passed and invalidate the consensus of an election “already” held… they will in affect strap on a Weapon of Mass Economic Destruction… stand in our collective Public Square and detonate! By not relenting to their onerous terms they likewise threaten our irrevocable demise and unknowingly or knowingly their own murder-suicide (every Republican in the House, the Tea Party and the Leadership will without question be held to account as accessories to this historic crime, this self-inflicted economic Pearl Harbor and even acts of treason)!
Their world is ever shrinking and circumscribed… they would make of a great nation a lesser thing! Their path is a descent downward in allegiance – to region (only), then state, then county, then city, then town, then fiefdom and finally to barricade the gates of their mind and then the door! They are the enemy within! They are the dry-rot in the floorboards of our civilization! They are the cancer metastasizing through the body-politic! They are collectively a dangerous unknowing child with a gun now found and they will wound us all TERRIBLY! Peace I’m out this bitch
Dude…You are on fire. Have a nice vacation.
The Obamacare website is in total meltdown. People all across the country are reporting how their premiums and deductibles are skyrocketing. These aren’t tiny little glitches.
This health care “reform” is a monstrosity. They will need to replace it with something else. Stop eating pschydelic mushrooms and come back to reality for once.
Mark, if you would be so kind sir as to use time and date stamps for your updates, that would be bitchin. Also, if it’s not too annoying to say so, I second the like/dislike buttons/counters for individual comments. And if you could mop the floor and get me a beer that would great too. Thanks brotha!!
Aren’t these ACA “marketplaces” where private insurance companies go to compete with each other to sell individuals insurance?
I can’t imagine how one’s insurance would go up significantly unless the Ins. companies are colluding to keep costs high like oil companies do.
My insurance through my employer went down for the first time in my life. It can only be because of pressure they felt from the ACA marketplace exchanges.
If your current insurance carrier is threatening to raise your costs because of “Obamacare” you may want to consider checking out the “exchanges” where you will most likely find much more inexpensive coverage. I think your current insurance carrier is “fucking with you” when they threaten you this way.
Or you could go with the Republicans solution to skyrocketing healthcare costs for the last decade…bend over and take it like a man, life is hard, pay your own way freeloader, screw your sick kids, screw your pre-existing condition, and finally…crickets!
Republicans don’t have any solutions just more of the same.
Well played sir, well played indeed!!