Obamacare: Taxpayers in the Hole for $1.5 Trillion

Late Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services – which has taken to bragging about “enrollment” numbers that fall millions short of their original goals – announced that the March 31st deadline for open enrollment had become more of a guideline.

Actually, we do have a couple of hints at what may cause such a delay. The Associated Press reports that, contrary to White House insistence that the Healthcare.gov portal is working smoothly, the site runs more slowly than enrollment portals run by insurers. In fact, response times from the server run twice as long, according to Compuware, a firm that measures website performance. The nine-second response time would garner an “unacceptable” rating in the private sector.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, one of the people most responsible for forcing Obamacare through Congress in 2010, has another theory. When challenged on the latest delay in the rollout, Reid responded that it was necessary because “people are not educated about how to use the Internet.”

Perhaps Kathleen Sebelius can explain her Congressional testimony to Speaker Boehner by claiming to have been joking when she insisted that there would be no further delays in Obamacare earlier this month. Sebelius was asked specifically by Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) about any potential pushbacks on the open-enrollment deadline two weeks ago, and replied, “No sir.”

The biggest joke, though, is the pride in which the White House promoted its five millionth sign-up earlier this month. The imposition of the Obamacare regiment kicked as many as six million Americans out of their existing plans by the end of 2013 despite the “you can keep your plan” promise, which means that we still have not yet hit the break-even point on market churn.

Those numbers are for sign-ups and not enrollments, which require premium payments to conclude; as many as 20 percent of those sign-ups have yet to make that payment. A significant percentage of those who have enrolled have done so in Medicaid programs, not private insurance.

All of that doesn’t begin to address the supposedly “fierce urgency of now” that demanded a top-down, command-economy government program to deal with the estimated 40 million Americans without insurance who should have flooded the system looking for coverage.

If this system works as well as the Obama administration insists, where are all of the uninsured? Why haven’t we seen massive numbers of enrollments from the beginning if that was such a crisis as to require the kind of intervention Democrats imposed, at an estimated cost of $1.5 trillion dollars over the next ten years?

That is the real joke, and it’s on us. Don’t expect us to laugh about it. Instead, we should double our efforts to jettison the jokers who are responsible for it.

LINK