Robert Laszewski: Obamacare 'in Grave Danger of Collapsing'

Robert Laszewski is president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates. He is acknowledged to be one of the foremost experts on health insurance policy in the country. After the administration released enrollment numbers today Laszewski took to his blog to warn “This program is in grave danger of collapsing…”

Here is the entire post from Laszewski’s website:

You know they are in big trouble when they come in at half of my estimates!

The audacity of this administration to continue telling people to keep
going back to the website and the call center when they knew full well
that only 25 people per day per state were making it thorough the
gauntlet that is Healthcare.gov is startling.

This program is in grave danger of collapsing if the administration
cannot dramatically grow the size of the risk pool and attract healthy
people to it.

The Obama administration doesn’t have a hill to climb, it has Mt. McKinley to climb.

Just yesterday the Wall Street Journal and CBS both published estimates of the number of enrollees on Healthcare.gov. They suggested the number would be around 50,000. The actual number released today is, as Laszewski says, about half that at 27,000 (that’s the federal site alone).

Note that this figure is somewhat suspect because the White House is using a means of counting enrollment which assumes anyone who has picked a plan on the website is enrolled.

The White House CTO was asked about this, in a roundabout way, during congressional testimony earlier today. He admitted that placing something in your Amazon shopping cart is not equivalent to buying it. It remains unclear how many of the 27,000 people the White House claims have enrolled have actually purchased insurance.