ObamaCare’s Missing Uninsured

by Karl Rove,

Most who have signed up already had insurance. The Medicaid numbers are no more reassuring.

“I’m not going to walk away from 40 million people who have the chance to get health insurance for the first time,” President Obama declared in November. Echoing his boss, White House press secretary Jay Carney insisted that millions of Americans are now “able to avail themselves of quality, affordable health insurance . . . many of them for the first time.”

The Affordable Care Act would right a great social wrong. Or so we were told. But reality is again intruding on the Obama administration’s narrative.

This newspaper reported Saturday that between 65% and 80% of those who have signed up for health insurance through the federal or state ObamaCare exchanges previously had coverage, according to insurers. A survey by McKinsey & Co. suggested that only 11% of those who purchased plans through the exchanges were previously uninsured.

Surprised? We shouldn’t be. This was forecast in a February 2011 study underwritten by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Researchers at the VA, Boston University’s School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School’s Mongan Institute for Health Policy focused on “crowd-out” effects in which employees and their families are moved “from private to public insurance without reducing the number of uninsured very much.” The study concluded that, over the long run, theAffordable Care Act “will shift increasing numbers of workers from employer-sponsored insurance to public insurance and federally-subsidized insurance purchased through exchanges.”

Crowding-out seems to have started earlier than anticipated.

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