It worked.
The Republican House Energy and Commerce Committee is holding a rather unadvisable hearing Wednesday, where things might just get a little bit awkward for them. See, they've invited a bunch of CEOs of health insurance companies to testify about what a disaster Obamacare enrollments have been, apparently to back up the fully debunked
"report" they issued last week saying that only 67 percent of people who had enrolled in Obamacare had paid their first premiums. You'll remember that the biggest problem in their report was their cutoff day for premium payments being April 15, when the last bunch of enrollees in March wouldn't have payments due until potentially the end of May.
If Republicans are hoping against hope that they'll hear Obamacare is failing and no one is paying their premiums, they'll be sorely disappointed.
As many as 90 percent of WellPoint customers have paid their first premium by its due date, according to testimony the company prepared for a congressional hearing today. For Aetna, the payment is in the "low to mid-80 percent range," the company said in its own testimony. Health Care Service Corp., which operates Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in five states including Texas, said that number is at least 83 percent. […]
"What you have here is very solid first year enrollment, no matter how you slice it," Dan Mendelson, president of Avalere Health, a Washington consulting firm, said in a phone interview. "This thing is, at this point, well entrenched." […]
Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee invited insurers to testify on enrollment after publishing a report last week claiming only two-thirds of people who signed up had paid their first premium.
"That was just foolishness on the part of the committee to even publish that number because it was completely out of context," Bob Laszewski, an insurance industry consultant in Alexandria, Virginia, said in a phone interview.
When did foolishness ever stop Republicans from trying to score a political point? Certainly not when it comes to Obamacare, which they are still firmly convinced will be a total failure because it just has to be because they hate it. They're not going to let a little thing like facts convince them otherwise.
They are, however, not going to be able to make much more political hay out of it, or prove that there's some grand conspiracy on the part of President Obama and the insurance companies to make it look like the law is a success. That's really going to be the case if Charles Gaba's prediction that 93 percent of enrollees will pay up proves true. Which means it's going to be all Benghazi all the time now.