Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Monday, November 11, 2013

Don't Panic

By the end of this week the federroble gummint has  promised to announce progress in enrollment in health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. Via my inbox, a preview from Avalere Health -- it's going to be a very small number, maybe just 50,000.

You already know how the corporate media will play this -- there seems to be a law that you have to say "trainwreck." Republicans will yell and scream that we have to repeal this disastrous mistake, and Democrats will start panicking and filing legislation to delay the individual mandate.

Pish tosh. Avalere also points out that enrollment in Medicare Part D - the Bush administration prescription drug benefit that is now taken for granted - was almost as slow. In fact, 2/3 of the people who ultimately voluntarily enrolled did so after coverage began, and fewer than 10% had enrolled one month before open enrollment ended. In other words, if we have the same experience, the Affordable Care Act will look like a big success by March, but it will look like a miserable failure in December.

Yeah, the bad web site has slowed things down a bit, but basically, people are procrastinators. The problems with the web site will be long forgotten by November of 2014.

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