Obamacare signups expose law defect

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) signup statistics cumulative through January 2014. There were 1.1 million new signups last month.  According to HHS, that is a 53 percent increase over the previous month.

HHS now brags that they are up to 75 percent of their target goal for this time in the signup period. So far, 3.3 million Americans have selected Obamacare plans through the federal and state exchanges. Sixty two percent of them selected Silver plans.

The New York Times published a story on the HHS announcement in their Feb. 12, 2014 edition.

The covered population is getting younger
– HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius,”Over 1 million signups added to rolls of health plan“, New York Times, 2/12/2014

In the NYT story Secretary Sebelius highlighted that more young people are signing up. The NYT says officials report, in January, that 318,000 people ages 18 to 34 selected health plans. That bringing the total in that age group to 807,500.

It’s important because the only way Obamacare can work is if large numbers of healthy young people sign up for health plans. They are needed to pay for the cost of the elderly and the millions more low-income Americans newly eligible for Medicaid under Obamacare.

That is the theory.

What wasn’t mentioned in either the HHS press release or in the text of the NYT story is a crucial piece of information recorded in an NYT table published along with the story. It’s highlighted in the graphic above.

It sticks out like a sore thumb:
3.2 million of the 3.3 million Obamacare signups are Medicaid or CHIP eligible!!!

Fully 96.4 percent of all Obamacare signups, so far, are eligible for government subsidized health care!

So who, then, is paying for Obamacare? The healthy young certainly aren’t. Probably most youthful signups are going into the CHIP program, a government subsidized health plan for low-income youth, and not paying fat premiums to fund everyone else’s health care.

The bottom line – taxpayer’s are footing the bill for up to 96.4 percent of Obamacare!

Federal taxpayer costs will start piling up at the end of the first quarter when states submit for their first quarterly reimbursements from the federal government. States have already started to absorb the costs for their share of Obamacare expenses.

It will take several years for increases in total subsidized taxpayer costs for Medicaid, CHIP and Medicare to grow enough to take a serious bite out of the federal and state budgets, but it will happen.

The taxpayer cost of Obamacare won’t be noticed enough to affect the 2014 mid-term elections. With President Obama’s tactical delays implementing certain selected portions of Obamacare, those costs probably won’t even be an issue in the 2016 elections.

This much is certain, though; no matter whether Democratic or Republican, the next Administration after Obama will be faced with a fiscal crisis brought on by subsidized Obamacare expenses.