You know Sagittarius A*? The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy around which all four hundred billion stars revolve? That includes stars that are in its immediate proximity. Astronomers have mapped the galactic core with various advances in detection and telescopic technology and have determined that the several dozen stars closest to Sag-A* whip around it at millions of miles per hour, and that their orbits create a pattern that looks like something a child would make with a Spirograph. Just like spiral galaxies resemble the cream you stir into your morning coffee, or flushing toilet water from the Coriolis effect. It's quite fascinating.
Occasionally, one of those close-in stars will, for whatever reason, get too close to Sag-A* and smash into it.
Now do you see why I'm using this "circling the drain" analogy?:
The Congressional Budget Office on Thursday slightly lowered its projections for ObamaCare enrollment, trimming its tally by about one million people.
About twelve million people are now expected to have ObamaCare coverage by the end of 2016, according to the nonpartisan budget office. Just three months ago, the office had predicted that thirteen million people would have coverage.
The latest enrollment estimate is an even steeper drop from the CBO's estimates from 2015, which predicted twenty-one million people would have [cartel] coverage by this time.
As should be abundantly clear by now, this is a recurring trend:
[T]here has been a steep drop off in the number of people who sign up for coverage at the beginning of the year over the months that follow. In 2015 that drop off was a full 25%.
If the enrollment numbers see a similar drops off in 2016 (25%) then the enrollment at the end of this year will be around 9.5 million. That’s well below the revised CBO estimate and even falls below the dramatically lowered HHS estimate of ten million. [emphasis added]
The other telling statistic: The biggest portion of the enrollment shortfall is in the unsubsidized, or wealthier, income levels. Which is to say, the ones who are supposed to fork over and otherwise be syphoned to pay for all the poor and sick who cannot otherwise afford coverage.
As Neo said to the Architect in Matrix Reloaded, "The problem....is choice". The Unaffordable Care Act took a lot of healthcare consumer choice away with the Individual and Employer Mandates (Bet you forgot about that last one - everybody will be remembering it a year from now), but not all of it. You can opt not to have healthcare coverage; but you'll be fined if you do. Which sounded punitive in the fraudulent context in which the UCA was sold - "bending the cost curve downward" - but as we all knew and argued at the time, premiums and deductibles were going nowhere but up, and now they have, and now that fine has become the much lesser of two evils to those with the means to make that choice and don't wish to be syphoned.
O-Care was set up that way, in turn, to incentivize that very outcome - the private health insurance market "death spiral" - through the comparative costs of compliance versus non-compliance and the "risk corridor" bailouts, which were to be phased out once the point of no-return had been crossed. And bang - no more private health insurance, an even bigger "healthcare crisis," and the only option would be Universal MediCare - in other words, single-payer socialized medicine.
That's where the cold-turkey elimination of the risk corridor bailouts via Marco Rubio's 2014 legislation cutting them off threw in the proverbial monkey wrench. Without that fiscal anesthesia, private health insurance carriers are bailing like escape pods from a starship whose warp core is about to blow - even the biggest carrier, United Health Care, gone after this year following their near-billion dollars in losses in 2015 alone,
In other words, the carriers - who were swindled into supporting this mess - were allowed too much choice by being able to wash their hands of it and walk away. And, of course, fewer carriers means even higher spiraling premiums and deductibles, until ObamaCare, and not its intended victims, finally smashes through the event horizon of the fiscal supermassive black hole, no matter how frantically the White House tries to prevent it.
One Democrat has taken notice - and is triangulating off of it.
In other words, Barack Obama just wasn't "the right socialist" to make socialized medicine work, and Hillary Clinton is.
And she'll get her chance, too, alas.
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