Wednesday, May 07, 2014

Have We Been Deduped?

Like a couple of dueling pianos we have a fight brewing on the percentage of people who have paid health insurance premiums on the exchange. One side says this:

67% of Obamacare enrollees have paid their premiums.

Then the other says this:

Most people - about 80% - are paying their Obamacare premiums.

Media is hysterical over paid enrollments as it is being spewed that paying premiums is the most important part of the success of Obamacare. Guess what - they are wrong.

During today's testimony in the House Energy and Commerce Committee several of the largest insurers in the United States stated that they have seen 80% or more of those who enrolled pay their first premium.

Lost in the noise was a paragraph from Mark Pratt, Senior VP of State Affairs for AHIP. It is this unknown that will drive the success of Obamacare enrollment.

Duplicate enrollments: Because of the challenges that surfaced with the launch of the Exchanges in October 2013, some consumers were advised to create a new account and enroll again. As a result, insurers have many duplicate enrollments in their system for which they never received any payment. In cases where an insurer has a new enrollment for a consumer who previously enrolled, they are not expecting that original policy to be effectuated – even though that data is still reported.
 
Which brings me to this: was the data being shared by these insurance companies today deduplicated? If so, then how many enrollments were there prior to the deduplication process for each insurance company? Answers to these two questions would have shone a bright light on the real enrollment numbers in exchanges.
 
But instead our elected idiots didn't ask. Nor has/will the MSM. Instead they would rather regurgitate figures verbatim without doing any actual research.
 
In both cases it appears that they have been deduped.
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