Sweet mappage of the not-so-sweet new Obamacare enrollment figures. Take a look.
The news is out: just under 27,000 people signed up for health care through Healthcare.gov in the first month. That’s a really, really low number. What’s equally striking to me is the other number: just under 80,000 additional sign-ups came through the state exchanges, for a total of just over 106,000.
It’s not just a hobbled website. Several things came together in October to seriously challenge and perhaps truly damage the roll out and perhaps even the future of Obamacare. The hobbled website created a backdrop of dysfunction and incompetence. The mass cancellations (which in many cases weren’t cancelations at all) provided a class of aggrieved victims. The President’s promise – which never really made sense given the nature of the program – tied it to the chief executive, with a moral, broken promise edge. Republicans have been trying to dismantle Obamacare for literally years. And they’re doing everything they can to fan the flames. But over the last few days Democrats (and not just Democrats from Red States) have been coming forward to support ‘fixes’ which would either seriously complicate the launch the Affordable Care Act or even kill it in its infancy. For Democrats and especially the President (who can kill any fix with his pen), it’s time for the big gut check, one that’s not only about 2014 but stretches back into the 1940s and has implications probably decades into the future.
