Fraud

A year ago, my son and I partnered to create a small ecommerce business. We built a website on an ecommerce platform, and after designing and building a product (now, many products) we opened for business. From the first day and every day thereafter, our ecommerce platform provided us with the number of people who visited, the number of people who put products into their shoping cart but didn't complete the purchase, the number of people who did purchase, the number of dollars associated with each purchase, the total dollars spent daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly. That data is available in real time and can be acquired with a very simple click of the mouse.

Why is it, then, that HHS secretary Kathleen Sebillius, who presided over a website that cost north of $400 million and took 4 years to complete, cannot provide congress with accurate and timely numbers on the number of people who have purchased Obamacare? "Purchase" means, quite simply, that the person has paid for their insurance policy with dollars that are theirs. The reason, of course, is that Sibillius has the data, but the data isn't good. Therefore, like so many other situations involving this administration, she stonewalls.

Carrying on in a tradition of mendaciousness that has now become so common that it elicits a shrug of the shoulders, the Obama administration claims that "over 5 million" people have enrolled in the A.C.A. Even some of Obama's trained hamsters in the media are questioning that number. Why? Because an investigation of past enrollment numbers indicates that an average of 20 percent of "enrollees" never pay and are therefore uncovered.

Jonathan Tobin comments:

As we’ve noted previously, the non-payment of the premium is not a technicality. Many of those purchasing the insurance may be first-time buyers and not understand that they must pay their bill before coverage starts rather than long after the fact, as they can with a credit card transaction. Or it may be that some enrolled with no intention of paying or thinking that the hype about the glories of ObamaCare they’ve heard in the mainstream media and from the president absolved them of the obligation to pay for it. But either way, the large number of non-payments renders the enrollment figures meaningless and ensures that the rates for those who do pay are going up next year by percentages that will shock them.

The president claimed that the number of enrollees has already reached the point where the law will work rather than collapse from lack of participation. But even if we accept his premise that falling millions of customers short of the announced goal of seven million is no big deal, the fact that hundreds of thousands of those being counted in the pool of those he’s counting are not covered because of non-payment of premiums makes his assertion a colossal fraud.

The reason that Obamacare is a colossal mistake is that the middle class and the young are being asked to subsidize the insurance for the poor, the almost-elderly, the sick, and the uninsured. That seems like a nice thing to do, but in order to create the necessary transfer of wealth (the underlying goal of Obamacare), the cost of policies for the middle class and the young has been considerably inflated. Worse, because people blanch as the costs, the exorbitant deductibles, and the lack of choice (e.g., "you can keep your doctor," except when you can't), they are not signing up for and paying their policies, so next year, insurance companies will (1) raise premiums significantly or (2) be bailed out by a president who is only too happy to spend the taxpayers hard earned money.

The slow motion train wreck continues.