Total Washington State ObamaCare enrollments
I've been keeping an eye out for the demographics. While many have gone on and on about the website, I myself care very little about that. IT is a confinable problem that can be fixed. That's a mathematical problem, essentially. What cannot be 'fixed' so easily is ensuring that the 'young invincibles' are signing up for ObamaCare in numbers sufficient to prevent any justification for insurance companies jacking up premiums. Again, I'm not worried about the website being fixed, which is to me, a minor problem. The key challenge for ObamaCare, politically speaking, is getting young people enrolled and paying premiums before the next election.
What we essentially have to do is a sales job. We have to convince a bunch of people under 40 who are currently uninsured to get insured and start paying into the system. In my view, the stick end of the persuasion, the $95 tax penalty, is insufficiently compelling. This has to be all carrot, and it has to be good. Keep in mind we aren't talking about enrolling people in Medicaid. Medicaid enrollees, god bless them, aren't paying into the private insurance pool. No, these folks wont qualify for that. They are folks who have jobs that keep them just above the poverty line, but out of the insurance market because of the high cost. We have to convince them to take a slice out of their meagher income and buy health insurance with it. Its a tough job, and only Democrats can and must do it.
From Washington State, we have some indication of how this is going so far. Washington hasn't had a total collapse of its website or any of the political mess on the Federal level. So it is instructive. The stats indicate a great deal of signups in the first month:
Paying customers gravitated strongly to “silver” plans with a medium level of coverage. As expected, initial signups were weighted to older people who tend to have more health issues, but officials pronounced themselves pleased with the level of signups, so far, from the hard-to-persuade “young invincibles” between 18 and 34 years old.
• 4,835 paid for a new plan and did qualify for a tax credit. The credits are available to enrollees earning up to 400 percent of federal poverty level (annual income of $45,960 for one person, $94,200 for a family of four).
• The paid-up customers divided this way, by age: 18-25, 5 percent; 26-34, 18 percent; 35-44, 19 percent; 45-54, 20 percent; 55-64, 37 percent.
Washington State had a total 57,730 enrollments in October, out of about half a million site visits. 51,379 of those were Medicaid. Of the remainder, 1,516 are enrollments that did not qualify for subsidies, which is good. Another 4,835 qualified for subsidies, which is also pretty darn good.
Demographics of private insurance enrollments
Around 23,000 of the folks under the age of 44 enrolled in Medicaid. Only around 3400 purchased private insurance, which is still a pretty good number a month in, but a lot more is needed. However, the greater majority of those who are paying into the private system are people over the age of 44, presumably those who have or will have health issues or possibly pre-existing conditions which will require treatment. Those folks are going to be used as the justification for jacking up insurance premiums on everyone else. That's just how insurance companies roll. We need that chart above to start balancing out a lot more over the next six months, both in Washington state and nationally.
The fact that there are any young invincibles enrolling at all is a good omen. That's with all the negative publicity and general bumbling. With a better marketing and targeting effort from the White House and Democrats broadly, I'm convinced they can be won over before the next election.