COLLAPSE OF OBAMACARE? – AT 11:51 A.M. ET:  Silvio Canto Jr. refers us to a piece in The Wall Street Journal warning of things to come, bad things, in Obamacare.    Remember that Obamacare was structured so that the benefits came first, and the costs came later.  A really dishonest scheme.  Americans will feel the real impact once Obama leaves office. 

ObamaCare’s image of invincibility is increasingly being exposed as a political illusion, at least for those with permission to be honest about the evidence. Witness the heretofore unknown phenomenon of a “free” entitlement that its beneficiaries can’t afford or don’t want.

This month the Health and Human Services Department dramatically discounted its internal estimate of how many people will join the state insurance exchanges in 2016. There are about 9.1 million enrollees today, and the consensus estimate—by the Congressional Budget Office, the Medicare actuary and independent analysts like Rand Corp.—was that participation would surge to some 20 million. But HHS now expects enrollment to grow to between merely 9.4 million and 11.4 million.

Recruitment for 2015 is roughly 70% of the original projection, but ObamaCare will be running at less than half its goal in 2016. HHS believes some 19 million Americans earn too much for Medicaid but qualify for ObamaCare subsidies and haven’t signed up. Some 8.5 million of that 19 million purchase off-exchange private coverage with their own money, while the other 10.5 million are still uninsured. In other words, for every person who’s allowed to join and has, two people haven’t.

Among this population of the uninsured, HHS reports that half are between the ages of 18 and 34 and nearly two-thirds are in excellent or very good health. The exchanges won’t survive actuarially unless they attract this prime demographic: ObamaCare’s individual mandate penalty and social-justice redistribution are supposed to force these low-cost consumers to buy overpriced policies to cross-subsidize everybody else. No wonder HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said meeting even the downgraded target is “probably pretty challenging.”

COMMENT:  We didn't need a complete rewrite of the health-care system to repair problems.  But the socialist/Dems went all in, hoping to climb the staircase to socialized medicine.  The staircase is collapsing, and the next president will be burdened with the task of cleaning up the mess.  My fear is that we'll get less care for more money, which is usually where government control leads. 

October 26, 2015