In a recent Rose Garden press conference designed to mitigate crumbling public confidence in Obamacare, President Obama hailed the story of Jessica Sanford of Washington State as a great success. Ms. Sanford, a fifteen year uninsured single mom sent the president an emotional email informing him that through Obamacare she finally signed up for affordable health insurance – it’s the perfect story to illustrate that the law works and that the uninsured are getting coverage. Unfortunately for the president, the story wasn’t finished and Ms. Sanford still can’t afford insurance.
As the Weekly Standard confirms, it turns out the president spoke too soon. Ms. Sanford did indeed sign up for health insurance through the state run exchange in Washington but she had not fully completed the process when the president told her story. In the days following the press conference, Ms. Sanford received a series of letters informing her that the subsidies calculated through the exchange were too high and would be reduced….to zero. The subsidy’s elimination made insurance once again unaffordable and forced Ms. Sanford to withdraw from the enrollment process. The narrative, as they say, is no longer operable.
There are so many things wrong here. After five years in office one would think the president and his team would know how to vet information before citing it to advance a narrative. The lack of vetting here suggests that the desperation for a feel good story was so great they picked the first one they found and ran with it without bothering to run down the facts. The law’s supporters should find that very troubling. Are there any “real” success stories out there?
This episode also reveals the problem with counting as enrolled people who have signed up but not actually paid for insurance. This method of counting may pad the enrollment figures on the front end but there will inevitably be downward revisions later to account for all the Jessica Sanfords out there who signed up but didn’t purchase because it was unaffordable or because they didn’t want the insurance and figured it would be cheaper to pay the penalty (or tax as Chief Justice Roberts calls it).
The enrollment numbers, already deeply troubling for the fiscal viability of the program, are going to take another hit when the bean counters inevitably revise them downward to account for the people who put a plan in the shopping cart but never completed the purchase. After all, bean counters have to count actual beans rather than fantastical, magical, skittles-flavored, unicorn beans. This is the reason Amazon doesn’t count something as a sale until a financial transaction has taken place.
Unfortunately, in the funny little universe of Washington, DC and particularly within the fragile eco-system of the Obama administration, the narrative is more important than things like facts and figures and solid numbers. But facts and figures and solid numbers are persistent little things. If the facts and figures don’t support the narrative, particularly when the narrative requires actual fiscal solvency, the bottom will fall out and the narrative will crumble. Right now the president’s preferred Obamacare narrative is crashing down around him and there is nothing he can do to fix it. Nothing.