When you start with low expectations, exceeding them is excessively easy. Take for just —oh we don’t know— a random example last year’s disastrous rollout of the Obamacare exchanges. The exchanges were so bad late-night, talk-show hosts were slobbering over themselves on how easy the jokes came. Yet, that is exactly what Connect for Health Colorado officials are touting as they show off how many more people they’ve enrolled this year than last. As Kristin Wyatt from The Associated Press reports:
Connect For Health Colorado officials said 6,144 people got health and dental insurance plans in the first full week of enrollment for 2015.
That’s way ahead of the 240 or so who signed up in the first week last year, when the exchange was new.
In other news, Goodyear released a statement after successfully landing their most recent blimp circling a football stadium, stating, “We’re really awesome at this blimp thing; we didn’t blow up like the Hindenburg … (too soon?)”
Oddly enough though, we can’t even be sure those numbers C4HCO released are accurate. In an article by Politico, the Obama administration admits they fudged their enrollment numbers last year by adding over 400,000 dental-only plans, plans that have never been counted this way before. As Politico reported:
The Obama administration has admitted that it inflated Obamacare enrollment numbers twice this year — including in testimony to Congress — thanks to an error in the way health insurance numbers were conflated with dental insurance figures.
The exaggeration, which HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said was an “unacceptable” mistake, inflated the reported number enrolled in Obamacare by 400,000. House Republicans first spotted the issue, and say that blaming the bad numbers on mistaken data “strains credulity.” [the Peak’s emphasis]
This fact adds a whole new intrigue when reading the first line of Wyatt’s article again:
Connect For Health Colorado officials said 6,144 people got health and dental insurance plans in the first full week of enrollment for 2015. [the Peak’s emphasis]
Seriously, do C4HCO officials think we don’t pay attention to the news? That the Obama administration can get caught red-handed inflated their numbers by over 400,000, but we here in Colorado won’t notice C4HCO trying to pull off the exact same tactic?
The whole thing gets even shadier when C4HCO officials reveal only a handful of those 6,144 are new customers, while the majority are just re-enrolling. As The Denver Post reported:
In the first week of open enrollment, Connect for Health said it had 6,144 enrollments, including about 1,700 new customers along with renewals.
Hell, we increased their budget by nearly a 150% this year to $66m+ for this piece of work, and C4HCO still can’t even accomplish the very basics of having people sign up without any trouble. What the hell have they been doing for the past nine months, since the enrollment closed? As The Post writes:
Technical glitches in the state’s online health insurance exchange have stopped at least 88 prospective customers from completing their applications despite assurances the site was more user-friendly this year.
The website still doesn’t perform the basic functions, C4HCO still won’t reveal how many of those are just dental plans, and somehow we’re still supposed to believe these clowns don’t need an audit? We look forward to seeing a bill rectifying that to come out of the state Senate soon.