BAM! Obama Sends Out Biden To Lower Expectations On Obamacare Enrollments

While it seems that the administration has gained its footing on the Healthcare.gov website woes, they won’t be meeting their own goals for enrolling Americans, and they’ve sent out Biden to start the apologies. Here’s the video:

This morning with the new numbers of enrollments, Joe Biden sheepishly admitted that they probably won’t hit their target of seven million enrollments by the March deadline, and predicted they’ll hit far below it:

“We may not get to seven, but we’re gonna get to five or six,” Vice President Biden admits, talking about the millions of people who were supposed to be signed up for Obamacare by March 31.

But about 20-30 percent of those “five or six” will have “signed up” but not paid – meaning they’re not signed up. So really we’re talking as low as 3.5 – 4 million, or just over half what was predicted.

And we can assume the original 7 million figure was picked as a lowball number the administration expected to say it had exceeded amid glorious fanfare.

Don’t believe it? Here are some numbers from an Obamacare supporter who has been aggregating the stats:

And this guy is actually happy about this – it’s “only” down 10%! Here’s the rest of his sunny analysis:

With the addition of the latest numbers from Colorado, Hawaii and especially California, if you include all ACA Exchange-based enrollments reported to date–both paid and unpaid–the total currently sits at a tad over 3.56 million people. The original CBO projection for exchange-based private QHP enrollment was 7 million, so we’ve finally hit the halfway mark. Of course, the enrollment period itself is actually over 77% of the way through, so this is more of a purely symbolic milestone than anything else, but it’s still worth noting.

No, really, he thinks this is a good thing – enrollments are barely at 50% of the target, even though we’re 77% through the deadline period, and enrollments are slowing down from last month. Hurray?

But wait, there’s more!! It gets even worse if you consider just the enrollments that have paid up!

…if you remove all enrollments known to be unpaid (about 265K) from the 5 states which have broken that out, and then subtract another 10% from the remaining 46 states, you’ll only have about 3.05 million enrollments which are paid (or unpaid due to billing problems on the insurance company’s end, which can hardly be blamed on the customer or the exchange system).

That’s how the media will spin this failure from the Obamacare architects – it’s private industry’s fault. Weird how Obama tells the free market “you didn’t build that!” when it succeeds, but doesn’t take any of the blame when it doesn’t interact well with his crony capitalist schemes.

 If Ever There Was A Doubt, Here Are Before And After Photos