C'mon, ladies and gentlemen, did any of you not expect Barack Obama to boldly stride into the Rose Garden yesterday like a colossus and proclaim that ObamaCare had met its goal of 7,000,000 enrollments by the "deadline" that expired Monday? No matter what the true number is, or how loosely and crookedly they pretzelize the definition of "enrolled"?
Apparently there were a few Republican senators taken by surprise:
President Barack Obama exulted in announcing on Tuesday that 7.1 million Americans had enrolled in Obamacare — but Republican Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn slammed the Affordable Care Act as a "botched law that has caused millions of Americans to lose their health insurance.First things first: Have over seven million Americans now signed up for ObamaCare? Not enrolled, which requires your application to be processed and premium payment, but signed up? As Patrick Brennan reports, the answer is....possibly:
"It has forced individuals to sign up for more expensive health insurance or face a penalty," Cornyn, the Texas Republican told Newsmax. "It has resulted in cancer patients losing access to their doctors — and it is slashing full-time jobs across the country.
"At 1600 Pennsylvania, that’s cause for a celebration," he added. "On Main Street, it’s a tragedy."
Cornyn joined many Republicans in statements to Newsmax or on social media that blasted the Obama announcement, which came a day after the first open-enrollment period ended. Texas Representative Louie Gohmert trashed it as "the ultimate April Fools' Day joke."
Leading up to the end of open enrollment at midnight, there certainly was a surge: HealthCare.gov alone (there are 14 other exchanges, including New York’s and California’s) apparently saw 3 million visitors yesterday, and about 1 million sign-ups occurred between last Thursday and midnight tonight. SEIU of the Bay Area made 20,000 robocalls in Vietnamese, for goodness’ sake.
The AP reported this evening that the number of sign-ups was on track to hit 7 million — which Secretary Sebelius had set out as a reasonable goal last fall for the open-enrollment period. This was all despite the fact that the website was down for maintenance at various times, was still spitting out errors, and couldn’t create new accounts at one point on Monday. All of which means that there will be some surely non-negligible number of people who will be completing their enrollments after the fact, as HHS said a while ago they’d allow them to do. By HHS’s definition of enrollments, it should be over 7 million.
This is analogous to hits in baseball. How many times have you seen your team continually load the bases inning after inning and always leave the base runners stranded? From thence cometh the statistic known as "batting average with runners in scoring position". Because you see, it doesn't matter how many hits a team gets, because that doesn't put points on the board; it's how many runs a team scores. The name of the game is to get on base and come around successfully to home plate.
In the same way, it doesn't matter how many people sign up for ObamaCare; what matters is how many people enroll, and then stay enrolled.
And, whaddaya know....:
This seven million is definitely not the same thing as the seven million insured individuals the CBO had projected the exchanges would cover this year, though it’s a convenient coincidence. Whatever Secretary Sebelius’s exactly meant when she mentioned the same number as a metric for success last fall, the actual plan purchases the CBO was projecting seem likely to short of the seven million number: If 85% of sign-ups pay their premiums, to take one estimate, that’s about six million people who actually get plans.You know how this drill works. Remember how reticent the Regime has been about releasing even sign-up numbers, much less enrollments, for the past six months? And how they've completely muddied up their terminology so that any number they throw out in public view could mean anything, to where just somebody surfing to healthcare.gov by mistake and creating a "hit" could count as an ObamaCare enrollment? Well, here you go.
Moreover, the CBO’s seven million projection was for covered individuals over the course of the year — since it’s a budgetary projection, this is an average over the course of the year, and not a specific number of individuals (e.g., it could be seven million people covered for the whole year, or 6 million covered for the whole year plus seven million for six months each, etc.). Surely as many people will drop off the exchanges as will join them because they lose a job or other insurance later this year, so we shouldn’t expect too many net new signups. Paid enrollment could even shrink noticeably.
I can just hear O over the past week: "I don't care if we have to count boogers from their nose pickings landing on their mice when they're on a URL that starts with the letter "h," you're gonna get me my goddamn seven million number so I can be mass-worshipped again! Understand?!?" And evidently, after a week of furious rino-spelunking ("Hi, I'm Lebron James, and I'm here to urge you to give your magic johnson a rest for a change and pick your nose while you're online instead."), he got the number he wanted.
And Republicans are scared. Much like a flashback to the Clinton years when the facts would be all on their side but Sick Willie would just stride out into the Rose Garden like a colossus and shovel enough BS to turn the Washington Monument into the world's largest turd and the American people would swallow every last fetid nugget and he and his party would get even more popular, and we would be left spluttering in crazed, helpless, impotent outrage.
Is that burgeoning, tsunami-bye-bye-waving terror justified? Not necessarily:
Suddenly ObamaCare is a roaring success, happy days are here again and liberals are euphoric, or claim to be. There are more than a few reasons to doubt this new fairy tale, not least the behavior of Senate Democrats running for re-election this year....Time will tell on that one. And it should be pointed out that we're only a day removed from Red Barry's Clintonoid boast. You know the old saying: A lie can be halfway around the world before the truth can even pull on its boots. LIVs and NIVs are prone to generously give the benefit of the doubt to leaders they haven't been programmed to hate. If the Regime "floods the zone" as it were with proclamations of ObamaCare's smashing success and keeps it up long enough, enough voters will buy it to keep the Senate in Democrat hands, and maybe even give them back the House.
Then there are the twelve Democratic Senators up for re-election who each cast the decisive sixtieth vote for ObamaCare. They're acting as if the law is still a political threat, and presumably their polls say as much. The ObamaCare Dozen have tried to create an alibi by saying the plan isn't perfect but mend it don't end it. They've now proposed some concrete fixes, and they must think their constituents aren't paying attention.
Or maybe not. Back to Mr. Brennan:
Enrollees from the surge may bring good news and bad news: On the one hand, one assumes that the people signing up for health insurance toward the end of the open-enrollment period — the one million signups over the last week — were more likely to be uninsured before the law, since they almost surely went a few months without insurance at the beginning of this year. That tallies in the law’s favor — as does the fact that marginal and reluctant enrollees are likely to be healthier than the eager enrollees from earlier in the process. But on the other hand, these people, though they’re more likely to qualify for generous subsides, are going to be among the most likely to stop paying their premiums at some point or never pay at all.
To get maximally cynical, many of them may have been pressured into signing up at the last minute along with assurances that their “enrollment” didn’t involve any financial obligation at all — since it didn’t. That could further depress the number of actual enrollments from the seven million headline and make the surge more of a PR stunt than a real accomplishment, though when we’ll get an answer on that is unclear.
Of course this was a public relations stunt. Don your hazmat suit and put yourself in the White House's position for a moment: ObamaCare was your crown jewel; you're the president that finally accomplished what no other Democrat had ever done - nationalize American health care. It took you, a god walking amongst men, to make that dream come true.
And ever since it debuted, it's been one disaster, fiasco, and cluster after another. You were shocked, you were stunned, you were gobsmacked, you were flabbergasted, because you really, truly thought it would work. Or else you planned this FUBAR but thought you could control it well enough to steer the country towards universal Medicaid/Single-Payer. Either way, it's been an open, sucking political wound, six months of raw agony at which you and your minions have been chucking every remotely possible dishonest excuse as salve. It's so bad that even your propagandists were forced to cover it like they were real journalists, forcing you to slap them down with the threat of FCC "oversight" if they didn't get back to toeing the party line.
So you moved heaven and earth, as only a god can, to get your seven million whatever figure to headline your Rose Garden pep rally on, appropriately enough, April Fool's Day. To what purpose? A favorable news cycle or two? C'mon, would a god settle for that little? No, as far as Barack Obama is concerned, this is the start of The Big Comeback. Now ObamaCare is "officially" a success, and nobody - not one, single, solitary American, no matter how saturated with TEA - is going to be allowed to believe otherwise. Heck, a month from now even Mr. Gibbs and myself may be rejoicing on air and in pixilated print about the glorious re-birth of the UCLA, sounding like robots from the Lost In Space TV show.
Well, okay, that may be a bit too ambitious even for a deity. But all it takes electorally is 50% + 1. And the "enrollment" trumpeting, combined with the blizzard of unconstitutional White House deferrals and delays of the Individual and Employer Mandates - all the gain now, all the pain later - is designed for one purpose above all: to save the Donk Senate and restore a Donk House. It has to be, since Barack Obama himself is irremovable from power short of an act of God (with a capital "G").
I've opined from time to time that The One is indifferent to the electoral fate of his party's congressional counterparts because, after all, he's functionally abolished the Constitution and has glommed all power unto himself. Yesterday's orgy of self-congratulation suggests that he does care about Dems' midterm election fortunes after all. Which is to say, Barack Obama is so lazy that he can't be bothered to even rule by decree; he wants Crazy Nancy back to join Dirty Harry in doing all that heavy-lifting, rubber-stamp drudgery for him, like the "good ol' days" of 2009-2010.
Will he get what he wants? With apologies to Mr. Brennan, that's what's unclear. But there are now "officially" seven million reasons why he will - and 216 days in which we'll deafeningly hear nothing else.
UPDATE: Dr. Krauthammer sums it up, FWIW:
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