ObamaCare’s numbers racket: Millions of canceled plans are a rounding error

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Charles C.W. Cooke:

Putting on a brave face and opting for defiance rather than contrition, the president boasted on October 21 that his new website had been a hit after all. “Turns out, there’s a massive demand for it,” Obama said. “So far, the national website, Healthcare.gov, has been visited nearly 20 million times. [Applause.] Twenty million times.”

Twenty million is a large number — such a large number, in fact, that it was deemed worthy of dramatic repetition in the president’s speech, and chosen, too, as the basis for the White House’s initial PR campaign. “The number of people who’ve visited the site has been overwhelming,” Obama claimed in the course of his defense, and this “has aggravated some of these underlying problems.” This message was quickly seized upon by the White House’s ideological allies: The problem with Obamacare, we were told until it was no longer credible, is that it was too damn popular, and no computer system could be expected to deal with the “massive” number of people visiting. At Wonkblog, Ezra Klein went so far as to claim that the significant interest was exactly “what the Republicans were afraid of.”

What a difference a week has made. Now, the administration is apparently unable to decide what constitutes a Big Number and what is merely loose change. Pushing back against the increasingly common realization that Obamacare’s achievements have thus far been to expose the president as an incorrigible liar and to corrupt the individual health-insurance market in precisely the way that critics were lambasted for suggesting it would, Jay Carney complained last Tuesday that reporters were blowing out of proportion the number of people whose health insurance is being canceled. “In some of the coverage of this issue in the last several days,” Carney griped, “you would think that you were talking about 75 percent or 80 percent or 60 percent of the American population!” Instead, he noted bitterly, “the universe we’re talking about” is only “5 percent of the population.”

Out of context, “5 percent of the population” does not sound especially impressive. But 5 percent of the population is 15 million people — or the collective population of Alaska, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho, West Virginia, Nebraska, New Mexico, and both the Dakotas. Fifteen million people is 300 Yankee Stadiums or two New York Cities. It is twice the number of Germans who died during the Second World War. It is, in another words, a lot of people.

With this in mind, one almost feels sympathetic toward the administration’s crack team of liars. By now, they must be realizing that they have been given an impossible mission: to argue simultaneously that 20 million people’s visiting a website is worthy of our awe and admiration and that 15 million living, breathing rebuttals to the president’s incessant “if you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan” promise are but an insignificant rounding error.

This will prove to be an almost impossible feat. Even if the sign-up numbers have improved dramatically by mid November, the deadline by which the White House has promised to finally divulge them, they will almost certainly be dwarfed by the numbers of those who have lost their insurance. Fear of such comparisons explains the administration’s reticence. Healthcare.gov may have experienced “massive demand” in its first few hours, but it has evidently failed to convert that demand into hard sales. The president claims that, on its first day, the site had 4.7 million unique visits; a leaked memo, meanwhile, shows that only six people signed up. Providing that the White House is telling the truth, Obama’s “really good product” thus achieved a visit-to-sign-up ratio of just 1:783,333. By way of contrast, direct mail — almost universally loathed — has a conversion rate of around one in 25, which means that the Smartest President Ever’s signature law is running around 31,000 times behind unsolicited copies of the Sears catalogue.

Even in states where the websites have been running marginally better, the promise of a surge in private insurance is looking more and more like a pipe dream. In Maryland, there have been 82,473 enrollments in Medicaid and 3,186 enrollments in private insurance; in Oregon, a state whose performance was proudly touted by the president on August 21, 62,000 people have been added to the Medicaid rolls while not a single person has signed up for private insurance; and in Washington State, the ratio of Medicaid to private insurance enrollees is 1:7. So far, it seems, the result of the federal government’s biggest expansion in 50 years has been hundreds of thousands of people added to a program that doesn’t work. The GI Bill this is not.

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Put it another way or two.
1.
Obama claimed he was creating ObamaCare to help 30 million people who were uninsured get insurance.
So, he’s willing to screw with 16.5 million people just to ”help” 30 million!
But that 16.5 million (5% of Americans) is just those who’ve been screwed with by getting cancellations SO FAR!
Next year, when the employer mandate hits, it will be many millions more!
And, predictions are that, after ObamaCare is fully implemented, a large number, perhaps 30 million, will STILL be uninsured!
So, all this for nothing!

2.
20,000,000 hits in 21 days = ObamaCare web site……
Compare/contrast:
Drudge = 033 million, 001 thousand, 911 in the PAST 24 HOURS
890 million ,600 thousand, 447 in the PAST 31 DAYS
In other words, 667 million, 950 thousand, 357 in the same 21 days!

During those dates, Oct 1 through 21, 2013, Muslims killed 1,007 people in jihadist attacks on earth.

Huffington Post averaged around 5 million hits on their website each day of that period.
That’s over 105 million site visits.
https://www.quantcast.com/huffingtonpost.com

Obama is crowing about small potatoes!
Is he really this out of touch?
Oh, yeah, he is.
He even encouraged his staff to watch less news and more ESPN recently!
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/president-obama-off-the-record-99180.html
also
http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2013/11/01/the-return-of-the-sorcerer/

obama’s lies are like a giant rock. Once it starts rolling, and builds up speed, it just wants to keep going, no matter what gets in its way. The obolder thinks he has enough speed that he can roll over anything.