Democrat High Fives All Around for Meaningless ACA Enrollment Number

There is an old military saying, "When you are up to your ass in alligators, it's easy to forget that the original mission was to drain the swamp." For the Affordable Healthcare Act this seems very apropos. The liberals won't remind you but the original goal of healthcare reform was to insure the alleged 40 million Americans who didn't have health insurance. Now for a little math: 7.1 million divided by 40 million is 17.8%. Would most reasonable people consider this success? This is just one of the many ACA "alligators". Even if one believes the number provided by the Obama Administration, there is no way to draw any real conclusions from the enrollment number reported Monday following the end of the first open enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) but that didn't stop the President and his fellow Democrats from crowing and doing a victory dance at a press conference. Funny how Mr. Obama didn't take any questions from the media - as if they would have asked any tough ones. In order for the number to have any meaning, we need to know the details. How many of the 7.1 million didn't previously have health insurance and how many of that number had to replace the insurance that they had and were happy with but lost because the new law 'declared' it inferior? Well the Administration won't tell us. There are many reports that millions of Americas were in this situation. Rand, the highly respected think tank, has determined that 6.3 million Americans lost their insurance due to the ACA. That would mean that only about 900,000 of the 7.1 million are actually newly insured. And how many of those who had to replace their insurance now have higher premiums and higher deductibles? Uh, well we don't know. How many of the supposed newly insured have actually paid their first premium? Again, we don't know but can one really be consider enrolled if you haven't paid? What about the percentage of the 7.1 million enrollees are having their new insurance subsidized by the government or how many people have been added to the Medicaid rolls? Again, no answers are forthcoming. Why not? When you have a program that encompasses one sixth of the U.S. economy, it is essential to set up a mechanism to accurately assess its effectiveness. You need metrics and getting those metrics would have been easy to get, if they had only asked these questions on the website but they didn't? Why? The answer is because they didn't want to know. This is precisely why conservatives hate big government programs like this. One would have to be ignorant, profoundly stupid or an ideological zealot to believe that the enrollment figure is any indication of success at all. If you are among the believers, you now have the facts, so you are down to two choices. So which one are you?