Patterico's Pontifications

10/8/2013

GOVERNMENT SLOWDOWN, DAY EIGHT

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 11:23 pm



Almost forgot it was still happening. How can this be??

Obama Faces Zero Questions on Glaring Issues at Presser

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 5:54 pm



So armed park rangers are threatening senior citizens with arrest if they “recreate” in a national park. And the rollout of ObamaCare is a joke, with perhaps a few thousand people (if that) having enrolled in the entire country, and a Web site that experts say is clunky and unprofessional.

Obama does a press conference and is asked about neither.

Really?

Even I, a hardened cynic about Big Media, am mildly surprised.

Extrapolating the ObamaCare Enrollment Numbers: Fewer Than 20,000 Enrollees Nationwide???

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:52 am



Jay Carney won’t tell you what the ObamaCare enrollment has been. It’s not because the numbers are embarrassingly low. Oh, goodness no! It’s because we release statistics monthly, and that’s what we do.

And by the way, here are the non-monthly statistics for visitors to the site: 8.6 million visitors in 72 hours! At least those aren’t embarrassing, huh?

“I’m glad you asked that question!” Ha!

So no, the White House won’t release the number of enrollees. But Maryland has, and they have had a stunning 326 enrollees.

The state of Maryland says it has thousands of people interested in buying health insurance on its new state-run exchange, but only 326 so far have actually enrolled in new coverage.

Golf clap.

Is it fair to extrapolate Maryland’s numbers to the country as a whole? After all, Maryland’s site (it runs its own exchange) has been plagued with technical problems. But so has the federal site. Maybe it is fair!

Let’s look at the numbers and see. Census.gov is down due to the government slowdown (of course), but Google tells us that Maryland has a population of 5,885,000. The U.S. population is 314 million, so Maryland has 1.87% of the U.S. population.

Maryland has seen 170,000 visitors to the site:

Those problems are reflected in the Maryland numbers released Monday, the first of what the state said would be regular data releases. The state said 13,532 accounts with verified identity were created as of Sunday evening, and it has seen 170,000 unique visitors to the website. But only 326 people were actually enrolled in new health-insurance plans.

Extapolating 170,000 to the country as a whole, that would mean the country as a whole would have seen about 9,000,000 visitors to various web sites. Turns out Carney’s numbers (the ones he is willing to release) say that there have been 8.6 million to healthcare.gov, it seems the extrapolation may be pretty close. Now, the feds are not running exchanges for all the states, by a longshot, so we could easily be off 50-100% here, but it’s good enough for government work!

So . . .

By my math (I majored in English and music, so beware!), if Maryland has 326 enrollees, that’s about the same as 17,394 in the country as whole.

In other words, based on the best numbers we have available, there have likely been fewer than 20,000 enrollees in ObamaCare so far — in the entire country.

Starting to get the idea why they don’t want to release the numbers?


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