We know that, just like Barbie before militant feminists bludgeoned her with their P.C. speech code, for liberals, math class is tough. The reason is obvious. Numbers don’t lie, and the Left does nothing else. That is not to say that liars don’t like to use numbers. They do, and Barack Obama is among the most enthusiastic users, even though in the past, he has demonstrated a propensity to have a bit of a problem stating them accuracy. Witness those 57 (or was it 58?) states, and the 10,000 people who died in a Kansas tornado, when the actual number was 12. These stumbles haven’t scared him away from numbers because he knows they lend an air of credibility to claims that are actually preposterous.
Hoping to make his ridiculous health insurance scheme appear to be something other than a laugh line, a reason to be seriously depressed, or a racket designed to usher in single-payer, government-run medicine (if you said, it’s all three, you win!), he reads numbers from his TelePrompTer to the usual audiences of fawning union supporters or backward children on college campuses. The lower the approval ratings for Obamacare fall, the more he tries to dazzle with numerology. Lately, he’s spitting out more numbers than one of those lottery machines at a convenience market.
On Monday, February 24,2014, he received another four Pinocchios from the Washington Post, the same paper that awarded him the “Lie of the Year” for his infamous whopper “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” Please permit me a quick digression. At this point, shouldn’t the WaPo just change the award from Pinocchios to Obamas? He’s a much more legendary liar. Anyway, Monday’s honor was for the following lie: “We’ve got close to 7 million Americans who have access to health care for the first time because of Medicaid expansion.”
For the first time? Not true, says the WaPo. Many of those people were already eligible for Medicaid, and were prior to the so-called Affordable Care Act. Some are already on it, and signing up for an additional year. According the studies they cite, the actual number is between 1.1 and 2.6 million.
Then on Tuesday, February 25, 2014, his regime released a gushing blog post, lauding another smashing success. Four million Americans have signed up for private health insurance through Obamacare exchanges! Oh, but wait. On Wednesday, February 26, 2014, the Washington Times reported:
Ohio officials have started to receive some of the more than 106,000 applications of Medicaid-eligible residents who sought health coverage through the new federal website.
Technical glitches had initially plagued HealthCare.gov when it was launched in October. The federal site was designed to help people buy private insurance under President Barack Obama’s law. If shoppers qualified for Medicaid, the site was supposed to send their data to the Medicaid agency in their state. That did not work as planned for the 36 states using the site.
A spokesman for Ohio Medicaid says the state began getting the first batch of cases from the federal government on Wednesday.
Does that 4 million that got Obama’s HHS (Department of Health and Human Services) so excited, who allegedly “signed up” for private insurance, include that 106,000 accidental Medicaid enrollees? How many other “glitches” like this one exist that might diminish that vaunted 4 million?
Many other questions occur to me, and without answers to these questions, it’s impossible to evaluate the “success” of Obamacare; specifically:
How many of those 4 million who supposedly “signed up” for insurance have actually paid their premiums? The New York Times reported that only about 80% had done so, which means we need to reduce the level of that “success” for the Regime to 3.2 million, even before we eliminate any errant Medicaid enrollees like that 106,000 in Ohio.
How many of those 4 million, or 3.2 million, or some other number Obama pulls out of a very dark place, are signing up to replace the coverage that they lost, thanks to Obamacare, either because their hours were cut, or because their employers decided to no longer offer health insurance? What is the actual net increase (play along) in the number of people covered?
Most important, how many of that 7 million number that helped Barack earn those 4 Pinocchios and now “have access to health care for the first time” because of the Medicaid expansion will actually get that access? Is access to health insurance the same thing as access to a doctor? Increasingly, Americans are discovering it is not. Although the exact percentage of doctors accepting new Medicaid patients varies from state to state, the national average in 2011 was 69%.
It’s clear that Barack Obama and his apparatchiks have given up any pretense of telling the truth about anything, especially Obamacare, so why stop with these phony numbers? They have been very creative with numbers before, inventing all sorts of new metrics like “jobs saved and/or created,” or “job years” to cover up their economic failures. Why not claim that 100 million people have “signed up” for Obamacare? That number is as real as any of these, and a lot more impressive. Next, they could claim that unemployment is actually 2% when calculated by eliminating from the potential workforce people over 50 who should have retired by now, or anyone who would like to be “liberated” from his or her job but hasn’t taken the leap to freedom yet.
On second thought, at least as far as those over 50, Obamacare may do the job of eliminating them, albeit not as quickly as the Regime would like.
Image: Courtesy of: http://11aitgs.wikispaces.com/Maths
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