Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) officials say they made a mistake when they falsely claimed that 7.3 million people were covered under Obamacare in September. But they only confessed and apologized when Republican Hill staff found the error and exposed it.
We all make mistakes, so under any other administration you might give officials the benefit of the doubt. But President Obama and his minions have forfeited that presumption. They have repeatedly misled, fudged, concealed and even lied to the public about Obamacare—and many other issues as well. It has become so commonplace that no one is even surprised when revelations of a new misrepresentation emerge.
And that was before economist and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber publicly boasted about the administration’s intentional deception and lack of transparency.
In the latest incident, HHS proudly asserted in September to have hit 7.3 million people covered under Obamacare, which was 300,000 more than the Congressional Budget Office estimate of 7 million. The overstatement allowed the president and his team TISI -0.51% to boast that Obamacare was working well—right before an election where Obama’s health care law was an important voter concern. Coincidence?
Now we learn it was all a mistake—or a lie. And HHS did it twice, overstating its numbers by nearly 400,000 in September—7.3 million when it was closer to 6.9 million. And again in November, when it should have been 6.7 million instead of the claimed 7.1 million.
Republicans at the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform caught Obama officials red handed and pointed out that HHS was including people with stand-alone dental insurance. Republicans had asked for the documentation for HHS’s coverage claims back in September but didn’t get them until November—after the election. That’s when Republicans discovered the discrepancy.
Incidentally, that false 7.3 million figure was actually down from a reported 8 million covered a few months earlier. You read that right: The number covered under Obamacare is declining.
One reason for that decline is that the individual market for health insurance is inherently unstable. People who are uninsured may be unemployed and so sign up for coverage, and then get a new job in a few months and drop their individual policy. Or a working spouse covers the uninsured family member under an employer plan. And in many cases people come to realize that they cannot afford their newly acquired coverage and drop it for financial reasons.
Annual turnover rates in the individual market can approach 50 percent. And while the Obamacare subsidies offset some of the cost of coverage, which would likely encourage people to stay in, people will be dropping out.
These deceptions, overstatements and sometimes lies have become the hallmark of the Obama administration—and especially its attempts to cover up the problems with Obamacare.
Remember how, once Team Obama got past the initial disastrous healthcare.gov rollout, the administration started touting the numbers of people “enrolled”? But then we found out that enrolled didn’t mean they had actually bought a policy, just that they had set up an account and maybe tagged one.
Or remember when then-HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius started claiming, in the summer of 2012, that Obamacare was responsible for the slowdown in health care spending? That was more than a year before the October 2013 rollout. Lots of health policy experts pointed out that the spending slowdown actually started years earlier.
My favorite non-Obamacare “caught you in a lie” was during the debate over the “sequester”—the provision that said if Congress could not come to a budget agreement, automatic budget cuts would be imposed. It couldn’t, and so the cuts hit in March of 2013. Republicans said the sequester idea came from the White House. Press spokesman Jay Carney absolutely denied it and asserted Republicans dreamed it up.
That’s when liberal Washington Post reporter Bob Woodard wrote a piece confirming that it was the White House’s idea. Carney hem-hawed but finally conceded the point. Had Woodward not used his gravitas to end the discussion—like House Republicans catching Democrats inflating the insured numbers—we’d still be debating it.
As far as I know, HHS may have made an honest mistake when it released inflated Obamacare coverage numbers. But when you work for a serial-deceiver administration you don’t get the benefit of the doubt. Believe them if you want, but not me.