So the Obama Admin's plan to keep rates low is "influence"?
Ah, so bcspace finally admits rates under Obamacare are, in fact, "low." This contradicts so many of your previous predictions in so many ways.
I loved your Newsmax piece, by the way. It is precisely the kind of skewed propaganda we've come to expect from them. Instead of dealing with the
thread I started on this subject you figured you'd just start another thread entirely and pretend the refuting evidence in my thread never existed.
I was particularly impressed with the way it relied on a single citation from the hill, but then ignored all the other things that source said which undermined Newsmax's overall point.
And then there was this fun piece of spin. After being refuted on months of failed predictions about costs and the number of enrollees, Newsmax implies Obamacare is doomed to failure without 40% being under 35:
The administration has repeatedly said that Obamacare specifically needs young people, ages 18-35, to make 40 percent of total signups to offset the costs of care for less healthy and older people, the Fiscal Times reported.
But this is what
The Fiscal Times actually said:
The Obama administration originally wanted young people to make up 40 percent of total sign ups.
LOL! That's typical Brietbart/Newsmax/WND pseudo-journalism. They are banking on your stupidity and refusal to actually check out their claims.
Of course had you bothered to read the article from the
New Republic you'd understand (well, probably not) that a 28% mix of younger enrollees is still very good news for Obamacare:
As for the age mix, you may have heard that about 40 percent of the population eligible for coverage in the marketplaces is between the ages of 18 and 34. That’s true and, obviously, 28 percent is a lot less than 40 percent. The worry has always been that older and sicker people would sign up in unusually high numbers, forcing insurers to raise their prices next year and beyond.
But insurance companies didn’t expect young people to sign up in proportion to their numbers in the population. They knew participation would be a bit lower and they set premiums accordingly. Only company officials know exactly what they were projecting—that’s proprietary information—but one good metric is the signup rate in Massachusetts, in 2007, when that state had open enrollment for its version of the same reforms. According to information provided by Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist and reform architect, 28.3 percent of Massachusetts enrollees were ages 19 to 34, a comparable age group.
Yes, that’s right: The overall age mix for the Affordable Care Act is
virtually the same as the age mix was in Massachusetts. More important, it vindicates the predictions of experts like Gruber who said, all along, that young people would be among the last to sign up. “To get to 28 percent overall, there had to be a lot of young people among the late enrollees,” says Larry Levitt, senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “
That also bodes well for who is likely to sign up next year.”[/quote]
That last point is important. We know now from the last few months of data flooding in that the younger crowd is the one that procrastinated the most. And much to the chagrin of Republican's who are upset with more people having quality health care, the 8 million figure
is only going to increase as some states are allowing people to sign up well after the dead line:
Enrollment in ObamaCare's new health insurance exchanges is likely to grow past eight million, as some states are still letting people sign up for insurance beyond this year's official enrollment deadline.
At least eight states and the District of Columbia are still allowing people to register for health plans, according to news reports and an April 14 analysis by consulting firm Avalere Health.
These extended enrollment periods are aimed at people who struggled to complete their applications due to technical glitches on the marketplaces over the last six months.
Enrollments can also take place for other reasons throughout the year. Marriage, job loss and interstate relocation are all factors that let people to sign up for new health insurance regardless of normal deadlines.
HealthCare.gov's special enrollment period ended on April 15. In several states, however, the general public can still sign up for plans relatively freely if they attest that they had trouble signing up over the last six months.
These states include Nevada, where consumers have until May 30 to complete their applications. In the District of Columbia and Oregon, the deadline is April 30.
Some states are determining special enrollment eligibility on a case-by-case basis. A handful, like Connecticut and Rhode Island, have not announced deadlines for people who faced technical errors.