The Department of Health & Human Services has just issued its report on ObamaCare enrollments. It is time to drink the tears of your Republican neighbors. Not only did ObamaCare exceed enrollment expectations, but 85% of the enrollees are receiving some degree of subsidy. And nearly 70% of enrollees are white, proving that freeloading is a multiracial American tradition.
Key findings from today’s report include:
8,019,763 people selected Marketplace plans from October 1, 2013, through March 31, 2014, (including additional Special Enrollment Period activity through April 19th). Nearly 2.6 million signed up in the State Based Marketplaces and over 5.4 million in the Federally-facilitated Marketplace. About 3.8 million people, including nearly 1.2 million young adults (ages 18 – 34), enrolled in the Health Insurance Marketplace plans in the sixth and final reporting period, which began March 2 and concluded on April 19. Those 3.8 million individuals represent nearly 90 percent growth over February’s cumulative enrollment.
Of the more than 8 million:
54 percent are female and 46 percent are male;
34 percent are under age 35;
28 percent are between the ages of 18 and 34;
65 percent selected a Silver plan, while 20 percent selected a Bronze plan; and,
85 percent selected a plan with financial assistance.Today’s report measures enrollment as those who selected a plan.
The federal Marketplace also reported, for the first time this month, the race/ethnicity of its enrollees. The application for coverage through the Federally-facilitated Marketplaces (FFM) contains questions on race and on ethnicity, both marked as optional. Thirty-one percent of enrollees did not report their race or ethnicity or chose “other.” However, of those enrollees who reported race and ethnicity:
62.9 percent of those reporting are white;
16.7 percent are African American;
10.7 percent are Latino;
7.9 percent are Asian;
1.3 percent are multiracial;
0.3 percent are American Indian/Alaska Native; and,
0.1 percent are Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.
Based on the latest census data, a surprising level of Asians took advantage of ObamaCare, possibly owing to their tendency to work for small businesses that don’t provide health insurance. Blacks are slightly overrepresented in the sample. In contrast, Latinos are lagging behind. I wonder if the explanation for that has some cross-over that also explains their low voter participation. Some kind of civic disengagement, perhaps?
In any case, if you think ObamaCare is just a giant transfer of white people’s hard-earned money to shiftless minorities, the numbers don’t bear that out. Maybe if you look into the S-CHIP and Medicaid numbers you will find more evidence of racial wealth transfer. On the other hand, if you take the 8,019,763 who signed up for ObamaCare and add in the 4.8 million people who enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP, and the 5 million who got ObamaCare-compliant plans outside the exchanges, and the people who got to stay on their parents’ plans, it amounts to a lot of moochers!
Also, too, 34% of enrollees are younger than thirty-five.
Republican tears taste so sweet!
We’re over the hump. From here, it just gets sweeter and sweeter. That of course assumes no catastrophic rate increases and no Republican president and congress teaming up to make trouble in 2016. I think our chances are good.
Conversely, if we get the presidency plus congress with 60 Senate seats, perhaps it would be time to start making phone calls and demanding a public option.
Some people have called co-ops stealth public options. I don’t know enough about the details to compare the two routes. However it is also encouraging that co-ops look healthy in some states although it’s too early to really tell.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/04/02/293327561/small-health-insurance-co-ops-seeing-early-succ
ess
Thanks Jeff. That’s heartening. Hopefully coops will emerge all across the country.
In any case, if you think ObamaCare is just a giant transfer of white people’s hard-earned money to shiftless minorities, the numbers don’t bear that out.
It doesn’t shift money to minorities. It shifts even more to insurance companies. WellPoint’s stock price is at an all time high. I thought the GOP loved that kind of thing.
“I thought the GOP loved that kind of thing.”
They do, they just don’t want to admit it. This way they get the best of both worlds: hypocrisy AND meanness.
And they are sooo good at both!
Boo:
“In contrast, Latinos are lagging behind. I wonder if the explanation for that has some cross-over that…”
nah, its just that about 55%-60% of the Latino Population are concentrated in the Deep South, the Western Great plains, Texas and the Mountain West.
No ObamaCare -> No Mystery.
In California, Hispanic/Latino participation in the Medi-Cal eligibility expansion and Covered California private insurance exchange also lagged behind other demographic groups. Marketers for the Hispanic/Latino community in the U.S. critiqued the early CC marketing strategy, which was to translate the English text for TV, radio and print ads to Spanish, word for word.
An example of the flaw in that practice was in one of the things highlighted in the English Covered Cal ads: the inability for insurance companies to deny or cancel coverage due to a medical condition. That polled very well to English-speakers, but many Spanish speakers had never encountered the concept of health insurance at all. To them, denial of insurance due to pre-existing conditions was unfamiliar, so it was unpersuasive and confusing.
So, what you’re saying is that the people in charge in CA found the only damn Republican in the state to do the translation?
They couldn’t find a 15 yo Mexican straight out of Tijuanna?????
No, the translations were accurate. The problem was that Covered California was trying to encourage Hispanics/Latinos to sign up with the same persuasion points they were using with the rest of the population. That strategy didn’t work very well.
I remember stories about how god awful the Spanish Obamacare site was. I also read that there is no word for “pre-existing condition” (I think it was that) in Spanish so you have to just describe the concept.
I have no idea if that’s true since I’ve always done all my insurance dealings in English.
Either way I wouldn’t be surprised if piss poor outreach even if later corrected is a major culprit.
Their tears are so salty, that I’m gathering them together and drying them, to salt the glasses for my Margarita’s!!!!
Stop trying to distract from the new Benghazi emails.
Obamacare does shift wealth from rich to poor and we should all be OK with that. “Redistribution” is supposed to be an ugly word, but law and the economy is stacked against the poor and set up to enhance the money making abilities of the wealthy.
After three decades of consistently shifting the distribution of wealth from those who have the least to those who have so much already, any attempt (no matter how mild) to turn the tide is welcome.