Chad leaves them hanging

Perhaps Republicans should abandon their efforts to defund Obamacare. Perhaps the best thing they could do is simply get out of the way. Chad Henderson became the poster boy for Obamacare overnight when he and his father appeared to be the only persons in America to successfully sign up for Obamacare.

Legs were tingling over at Huffington Post:

Three days into the first six months of enrollment on Obamacare’s websites, the federal government won’t say how many Americans have signed up so far amid widespread technical glitches. But at least one family was able to navigate the websites and sign up for coverage.

Just after midnight on the first day of sign-up Tuesday, Chad Henderson, 21, and his 58-year-old father, Bill, jumped onto HealthCare.gov, the portal for the more than 30 health insurance exchanges being run by the federal government and the marketplaces operated by 16 states and the District of Columbia.

“I was excited,” Chad Henderson said in a telephone interview with The Huffington Post Thursday. He had seen on Twitter that the exchanges opened at midnight. “We stood on there until about 3 in the morning,” he said. Chad and his father live in Flintstone, Ga., near the Tennessee border, about 5 miles from Chattanooga.

Did I mention that Chad is a volunteer for OFA?

The Hendersons are getting a lot of attention right now as one of the few people who have publicly identified themselves as having signed up for Obamacare. The Wall Street Journal has contacted him, Chad claims, and the Washington Post featured him in a blog post Thursday. The Huffington Post contacted him via Twitter late Wednesday. Chad volunteered for President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign last year.

The website worked like a champ for Chad:

“Once I created an account, there were hardly any glitches at all after that,” Chad said, likening the shopping experience to comparing cell phones on Verizon’s website.

Chad claimed that he would be paying $175 per month for his Bronze Plan but Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute says Chad could have gotten an e-insurance plan for about $45 per month.

The successful enrollment of a single individual was of such importance that new outlets crawled all over Chad and Chad was no shrinking violet. He got face time on TV:

He let everyone know that the Obama lapdog press was sniffing his shoes:

Why, Chad is helping the President make history!

This 21 year old is so impressive that he got his own plan instead of riding Dad’s plan!

The Hendersons could have opted for a single plan for both of them, because the health law allows young adults to stay on a parent’s health insurance until they turn 26, but Bill Henderson thought his son should buy his own. “He’s old school, so he wants me to take responsibility,” Chad said.

Golly, it seems just too good to be true! This is bigger than Jesus! And there’s a reason for that.

It’s not true.

Chad has been a naughty boy. Fortunately, his father seems to have a little more integrity.

But details of Chad’s story proved difficult to verify. And in a phone interview conducted this morning, Chad’s father Bill contradicted major details of Chad’s story. I reached Bill Henderson by following a series of links at Chad’s Facebook page, through which I was able to speak directly to the father.

Bill Henderson told me that both he and his son were interested in getting coverage, but that he had not enrolled in any plan yet, and to his knowledge, neither had his son. He also said that when they do enroll, getting the most coverage for the least money would be the goal, and that he expects that he and his son will get coverage under the same plan.

Bill told me that Chad had been looking into plans online. “He told me that there’s different plans. And we haven’t decided which plans to enroll in yet.”

I asked him whether he and his son had talked about going on separate plans, and he told me that, “We’ll probably go on the same plan, more than likely.”

Chad prevaricated about pretty much everything, including the cost

Other details from Chad’s story were also difficult to verify. He said his premium was unsubsidized, and cost around $175 a month for the cheapest Bronze coverage plan available. He told the Chattanooga Times Free Press that he got his coverage through Blue Cross Blue Shield. But the cheapest unsubsidized Bronze exchange plan at Blue Cross Blue Shield’s online Quick Quote system offers for a 21-year-old in Flintstone, Georgia is $225.09 a month.

and the separate plan:

Additionally, Chad could not have purchased a separate plan for his father from his own login to HealthCare.gov, the website for the federal exchanges. A customer assistance representative on HealthCare.gov’s LiveChat system told me that purchasing separate plans for a son and a father in Georgia would require two separate logins. Which means that Chad would have had to successfully create two different accounts, and complete enrollment twice, at a time when almost no one was able to get through on the system.

What might the most amusing part of this story is that Chad doesn’t believe he was lying.

Chad definitely has a future in the democrat party. Did I mention Chad hails from Flintstone, Ga?

DrJohn

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