More Saturday Obamacare Schadenfreude

A warm, but cloudy day here in Slower Maryland. We may get some showers later, but nothing of great consequence.  Kind of like today's Obamacare Schadenfreude.  We all complain about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

It's only money, right? Some States Spent Hundreds to Help Sign Up Each Obamacare Enrollee

Hawaii spent $920 to enroll each new Obamacare consumer, while Florida spent only $16.

New data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation details the amount spent on consumer assistance for the Affordable Care Act in each state, and like overall enrollment numbers, the state totals vary a huge amount.

Consumer-assistance programs are those intended to help individuals understand and enroll in coverage under Obamacare, including the Navigator program, the In-Person Assister program, and Certified Application Counselors. The totals do not include funding for the exchange systems or other types of public and private outreach.

Overall, the state-based marketplaces spent far more to help get residents enrolled than states in the federal marketplace. State exchanges accounted for 50 percent of total consumer-assistance funds, yet have only 31 percent of all uninsured, according to RWJF. Federal marketplaces accounted for 33 percent of the funding but house 63 percent of the uninsured, and the five partnership states received 17 percent of the assistance funding, yet include only 6 percent of the total uninsured.

This must not include the cost of the website and the attendant bureaucracy as well.  Oregon, for example, made a $250 million dollar website which enrolled exactly ... no one.  Using paper and pencil they managed to enroll $240,000 people.  You can do the math yourself, but suffice it to say that dividing the website cost alone by the number of people enrolled in Oregon would be off the chart.

The "Death Spiral" take a turn for the worst: Only 28% of ObamaCare enrollees are 18-34

The demographic that was key to holding down health care costs apparently came in well below the level necessary to ensure that:

Just more than a quarter of the eight million people who signed up for health plans under the Affordable Care Act are in the prized demographic of 18 to 34 years old, falling short of the figure considered ideal to keep down policy prices.
The data, released Thursday by the Obama administration, painted a more complete picture of enrollment in the plans. They show that about 28% of people picking plans on the state and federal insurance exchanges by April 19—after most states’ enrollment deadlines passed—were 18 to 34 years old, a generally healthy group. The proportion is higher than previous counts. But it is significantly below the 40% level that some analysts consider important for holding down rates by balancing the greater medical spending generated by older enrollees.
Insurers right now are setting rates for 2015, and the age data will be a key factor in their decisions. Some insurers say that despite seeing a late surge in younger enrollees, their sign-ups still skewed older overall than they had expected.

Because the “healthy” demographic sign-up fell well below expectations, the rates for 2015 are expected to be at a higher rate. And, of course, there’s the further problem that “enrollment” doesn’t necessarily mean that the enrollee has paid for coverage. 

When the president said that 35% of the people enrolled in health care were under 34, he was including the children of policy holders, who do not buy policies of their own.  Figures may not lie, but liars use figures.

Why Hispanics Didn't Get Obamacare

Democrats still need to convince Hispanic voters that Obamacare is good for them.

Some 10.7 percent of health insurance exchange applicants were Latino, the Health and Human Services Department announced Thursday. This is the first time the Obama administration has released racial and ethnic information about the exchange population, and because applicants weren't required to disclose their race and ethnicity, the numbers reflect the roughly 70 percent who opted to report.

But the numbers track well with other surveys about the change in the uninsured rate among racial and ethnic minorities. Fewer than 11 percent of uninsured Hispanics got coverage during the Affordable Care Act's open-enrollment period, according to data from the most recent Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index survey. That's compared with 16 percent gains for blacks, 17 percent for Asians, and 14 percent for whites.

The number matters, because Hispanics are the nation's largest uninsured minority, accounting for 25 percent of all uninsured individuals in the United States who are eligible for coverage under the president's health law. And although 10.7 percent of exchange applicants were Latino, there's no indication of how many were signing up for health coverage for the first time. By Gallup's count, 37 percent of Hispanics remain uninsured—and the next closest subgroup, blacks, are all the way down at 17.6 percent uninsured.

Why didn't most of the 10.2 million uninsured Latinos eligible for coverage buy health insurance this year?

In part, it's because the administration fumbled. It delayed the launch of CuidadoDeSalud.gov—the Spanish-language enrollment website—until December, when it "soft launched" so that Latino groups working with the administration could test and report bugs.

My personal theory on why Hispanics failed to sign up in the number they had hoped was that Hispanics, predominantly younger and working, were unimpressed with the benefits compared to the costs.

More on how Obamacare will slowly destroy the employee sponsored health care system in favor of the governments from Just One Minute: If You Like Your Employer-Sponsored Health Plan You Can Keep It. Unless... who discusses three or four different articles:

A new report described at The Hill, the NY Times and McClatchy describes the next shoe to drop on ObamaCare. From The Hill:

The Affordable Care Act could save some of America’s largest corporations hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade, according to a market analyst group.
According to a report by S&P Capital IQ released Thursday, S&P 500 companies will likely move their employees from employer-provided health insurance plans to the healthcare exchanges under the Affordable Care Act, saving employers nearly $700 billion through the year 2025. If current healthcare inflation stays constant, those savings could be greater than $800 billion, researchers found.
Corporations are expected to start out by dropping low-wage and part-time workers from their employer insurance plans since they are able to reap the benefits of government tax subsidies under ObamaCare, leading them to pick up new plans under the healthcare law. Eventually, the burden of healthcare coverage will shift from employers to employees.

The idea of dropping low-wage and part-time workers goes in the No Kidding file (with a 'Now They Tell Us' cross-tab). Dropping higher paid workers, for whom the tax shield provided by the current treatment of employer-sponsored coverage is valuable, is more surprising to me . . .

and includes a link to this cool graph at the Fiscal Times:

Looks like a government takeover, with essentially zero benefit to the employee to me. For the government and the companies it's win-win.  Government gets the control, which it wants, and companies loose the expense and hassle of running health care plans.