Thread: Biden: 'We may not get to 7 million' by Obamacare deadline

Reuters
Wed Feb 19, 2014

Biden: 'We may not get to 7 million' by Obamacare deadline

(Reuters) - Vice President Joe Biden acknowledged on Wednesday that it will be hard to reach the target on the number of people signing up for health insurance by a looming March 31 deadline for Obamacare enrollment.

The Congressional Budget Office had originally forecast that 7 million people would sign up for insurance, many with help from subsidies provided under the Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare.

But the program got off to a rough start in October when a website used to shop for insurance plans failed to work for almost two months. The nonpartisan CBO recently trimmed its enrollment forecast for 2014 to 6 million.

Biden, on his way to a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Minneapolis, spoke with a small group of people in the city who are working to help others sign up for insurance, and thanked them for their work.

"We may not get to seven million, we may get to five or six, but that's a hell of a start," Biden said, according to a pool report of his meeting.

The Obama administration said last week that 3.3 million people have enrolled in private Obamacare health plans between October 1 and Feb 1.

The deadline for 2014 coverage is March 31, and the administration and allied groups are pushing to convince more uninsured people in big cities to sign up.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A1J02N20140220

That Hilarious Moment When Jimmy Kimmel Asks How Many Audience Members Have Signed Up for Obamacare

Conservative Daily

What do you want, Joe, a gold star for effort?

This is your Vice President's analysis of ObamaCare's rollout...





Biden Calls Lower Number Of ObamaCare Enrollees Than Projected A 'Hell Of A Start'

Mike Miller
On February 20, 2014
http://mikesright.wordpress.com/



Vice President Joe Biden admitted Wednesday that ObamaCare will fall short of its projected goal of 7 million enrollees by March 31st, but also claimed that 5-6 million people will have signed up by then.
“We may not get to 7 million, but if we get to 5 or 6 million that’s a hell of a start,” Biden said.
The Vice President attributed low enrollment numbers to the disastrous rollout of the ObamaCare website: “We didn’t want this to start off as shaky as it did,” he said. “But it’s complicated.”
Enrollment is currently at about 3.3 million. While the glitch-plagued website has been partially to blame for lower-than-projected enrollee numbers, increased premiums and higher deductibles have also been a major factor in keeping people away, but don’t tell Joe.

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/02/1165...are-enrollees/

Conservative Daily

Somebody cue the clown music - Joe Biden's back.

When Obama's failure is not as much of a failure as other failures, it's called a "success"...




BAM! Obama Sends Out Biden To Lower Expectations On Obamacare Enrollments

Soopermexican
On February 20, 2014
http://www.soopermexican.com

While it seems that the administration has gained its footing on the Healthcare.gov website woes, they won’t be meeting their own goals for enrolling Americans, and they’ve sent out Biden to start the apologies.

This morning with the new numbers of enrollments, Joe Biden sheepishly admitted that they probably won’t hit their target of seven million enrollments by the March deadline, and predicted they’ll hit far below it:

“We may not get to seven, but we’re gonna get to five or six,” Vice President Biden admits, talking about the millions of people who were supposed to be signed up for Obamacare by March 31.

But about 20-30 percent of those “five or six” will have “signed up” but not paid – meaning they’re not signed up. So really we’re talking as low as 3.5 – 4 million, or just over half what was predicted.

And we can assume the original 7 million figure was picked as a lowball number the administration expected to say it had exceeded amid glorious fanfare.

Don’t believe it? Here are some numbers from an Obamacare supporter who has been aggregating the stats:

And this guy is actually happy about this – it’s “only” down 10%! Here’s the rest of his sunny analysis:

With the addition of the latest numbers from Colorado, Hawaii and especially California, if you include all ACA Exchange-based enrollments reported to date–both paid and unpaid–the total currently sits at a tad over 3.56 million people. The original CBO projection for exchange-based private QHP enrollment was 7 million, so we’ve finally hit the halfway mark. Of course, the enrollment period itself is actually over 77% of the way through, so this is more of a purely symbolic milestone than anything else, but it’s still worth noting.

No, really, he thinks this is a good thing – enrollments are barely at 50% of the target, even though we’re 77% through the deadline period, and enrollments are slowing down from last month. Hurray?

But wait, there’s more!! It gets even worse if you consider just the enrollments that have paid up!

…if you remove all enrollments known to be unpaid (about 265K) from the 5 states which have broken that out, and then subtract another 10% from the remaining 46 states, you’ll only have about 3.05 million enrollments which are paid (or unpaid due to billing problems on the insurance company’s end, which can hardly be blamed on the customer or the exchange system).

That’s how the media will spin this failure from the Obamacare architects – it’s private industry’s fault. Weird how Obama tells the free market “you didn’t build that!” when it succeeds, but doesn’t take any of the blame when it doesn’t interact well with his crony capitalist schemes.

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/02/1165...e-enrollments/