Monday Morning Obamacare Schadenfreude Cheap Shot

Cheap shot because most of the material comes from this post by Gabriela Malor at Aces.

Enrollment Errors Cut, Officials Say; Fixes Are Overstated, Insurers Report

The Obama administration said Saturday that it had reduced the error rate in enrollment data sent to insurance companies under the new health care law, even as insurers said that the government’s records were still riddled with mistakes.
. . .
Insurers said that they had found many discrepancies and errors and that the government was overstating the improvements in HealthCare.gov.

In some instances, they said, the federal government reported that the home address for a new policyholder was outside an insurer’s service area. In other cases, a child was listed as the main subscriber — the person responsible for paying premiums — and parents were listed as dependents.

In some cases, children were enrolled in a policy by the federal government and parents were left off, or vice versa. In other cases, the government mixed up the members of a family: A child or spouse was listed two or three times in the same application in late November. Such errors can have financial implications, increasing the amount of premiums that a family is required to pay.

It's bad when even the NYT admits the government is shading the truth.

 California sending "insurance educators" to enroll college students

The image projected before the classroom of Cal State L.A. students showed a pair of gleeful sky divers plunging through the air. "You're young and you're healthy.... Why do you need health insurance?" a caption asked.
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Supporters and detractors of Obamacare are fixating on so-called "young invincibles" like the Cal State students, generally healthy adults in their 20s and 30s who don't rack up large healthcare bills.

Only by collecting premiums from many more of those infrequent users of medical services can insurance plans expect to offset the higher costs of treating newly insured older and sicker patients. An oft-repeated estimate is that for the White House's reforms to succeed, 40% of those signing up for coverage through new state and federal healthcare marketplaces must come from the under-35 adult demographic.
. . .
Interest in the insurance marketplaces is strong among young people, according to some polls. But nearly 60% of 18-to-29-year-olds without insurance disapprove of the healthcare changes, according to a report released last week by Harvard University's Institute of Politics. Fewer than a third said they were likely to enroll through the new exchanges, and 41% said the chances of that were "50-50."

Sa habla Obmamacare? Health insurance enrollment by Hispanics is lagging in California

Even though the administration has not released national Hispanic enrollment numbers, the California figures are a “red flag” for what might be happening more broadly, said Gabriel R. Sanchez, a pollster specializing in the Hispanic community and head of the Robert Wood Johnson Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico.

“California was supposed to be out in front of the pack on marketing efforts targeting Latinos,” he said. “The fact that their numbers don’t look good is pretty dire for the administration.”

Less than 5 percent of the 109,296 people who enrolled in health insurance in California in October and November identified themselves as Spanish speakers, according to data released by the state on Thursday — a strikingly low number considering that more than a quarter of the state’s population primarily speaks Spanish and that Latinos constitute nearly half the number of uninsured who are eligible to buy coverage on the state exchange.

In DC, they're also going to the where the kids are to enroll the "young invincibles".  But since it's DC, going to a college would be all but useless: Efforts to enroll young in ObamaCare heads to Air Jordan debuts, late-night haunts

District of Columbia officials are recruiting young residents this weekend to enroll in ObamaCare by showing up where they “party by night and shop by day.”

Officials on Saturday visited two Footlocker stores where Nike’s exclusive Air Jordan 12 “Taxi” sneakers were going on sale. And they are scheduled to visit two Denny’s restaurants from 2 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday.

“My motto is ‘Get them health care while you get them Jordans,” DC Health Links representative Vanessa Brooks told Fox News outside a Footlocker in the city’s downtown.

Between the "young invincibles" and the Latinos, it looks like the California brand of Obamacare is seriously in trouble.  Like many others, they all thought health care reform was a good idea, until they figured out that they were the ones who had to pay for it.

Finally (at least for today), it appears that the 85% of people who were assured that Obamacare wasn't going to affect the healthcare that the already had and were satisfied with it believe that Obamacare will make their insurance more expensive, and less comprehensive:

In the survey, nearly half of those with job-based or other private coverage say their policies will be changing next year - mostly for the worse. Nearly 4 in 5 (77 percent) blame the changes on the Affordable Care Act, even though the trend toward leaner coverage predates the law's passage.

Sixty-nine percent say their premiums will be going up, while 59 percent say annual deductibles or copayments are increasing.

Only 21 percent of those with private coverage said their plan is expanding to cover more types of medical care, though coverage of preventive care at no charge to the patient has been required by the law for the past couple of years.

Fourteen percent said coverage for spouses is being restricted or eliminated, and 11 percent said their plan is being discontinued.

"Rightly or wrongly, people with private insurance looking at next year are really worried about what is going to happen," said Robert Blendon, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, who tracks public opinion on health care issues. "The website is not the whole story."
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Disapproval of Obama's handling of health care topped 60 percent in the poll.

 Now, if only they'll vote on this belief.