CBS News: Obamacare's Entire Financial Model is In Danger of Collapsing

Guy Benson | Oct 25, 2013

With so much of the media's attention fixated on Obamacare's technological meltdown, some important storylines have gone under-explored. CBS news, to its credit delved into one of them today, noting that of the people who have successfully obtained coverage under the new law, it appears that the vast majority of them are new Medicaid enrollees. And that poses a mortal threat to the entire structure of the law:

The disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov may have another serious problem: A CBS News analysis shows that in many of the 15 state-based health insurance exchanges more people are enrolling in Medicaid rather than buying private health insurance. And if that trend continues, there's concern there won't be enough healthy people buying health insurance for the system to work...The newly insured in some of those states are overwhelmingly low-income people signing up for Medicaid at no cost to them. Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, said, "We're seeing a huge spike in terms of Medicaid enrollments." He says the numbers have surprised him and state officials. CBS News has confirmed that in Washington, of the more than 35,000 people newly enrolled, 87 percent signed up for Medicaid. In Kentucky, out of 26,000 new enrollments, 82 percent are in Medicaid. And in New York, of 37,000 enrollments, Medicaid accounts for 64 percent...Gail Wilensky, a former Medicaid director, said the numbers are causing concern in the insurance industry, which needs healthy adults to buy private insurance in large numbers for the system to work. "Either the private insurance enrollments come up somewhere around the expected amount or there's going to be a problem. ... You need a volume and you need a mix of people that are healthy as well as high users in private insurance, in order to have it be sustainable," she said.

Those stats from Washington, Kentucky and New York are hugely problematic. The poor and sick are managing to sign up for Medicaid -- to the "surprise" of state officials -- but they aren't been offset by people who are actually purchasing care. Another crucial point: Medicaid was already in very poor fiscal and functional condition before Obamacare extended it massively. It's terribly underfunded; many doctors and hospitals refuse to accept new Medicaid patients due to the government's paltry reimbursement rates. Perhaps worst of all, Medicaid is catastrophically ineffective. Just because indigent individuals are enrolled in Medcaid coverage doesn't mean they actually receive quality care. According to the most comprehensive study ever done on the program (which used Oregon's system as the basis for analysis) poor people enrolled in Medicaid have no better health outcomes than their uninsured counterparts. We're not just spending endless billions on a program that flat-out doesn't work, we're expanding it through Obamacare. This is why the president isn't being truthful when he claims that apart from the website, the underlying Obamacare product is "good" and working "really well." It's not. We touched on the issue of dropped coverage yesterday, another one of the law's glaring flaws and broken promises. CBS News is on that case, too:

Read more at Townhall.com

If CBS is doing negative reporting on ZeroCare, it must really be bad.

But not to worry that's what the Fed's printing press is for. shoring up institutions TBTF while we are all herded into a single payer system.

Hmmm . . . wonder why the GOPe didn't latch onto dissatisfaction with this monstrosity and back funding everything except ObamaCare ?