Often, the best reporting on events in America comes from the British papers. Today’s U.K. Daily Mail is an example of that fact.
An article in the U.K. Daily Mail today reports that only three of the thirteen people standing behind President Obama during his speech yesterday had actually enrolled in ObamaCare. That’s interesting since they were standing there to show their support of ObamaCare.
The article explains who the people in the photo-op were:
They include the state of Delaware‘s first Obamacare insurance participant – and, so far, its only one – along with a Tennessee woman who enrolled less than a day before the press event, and a Washington, D.C. man that the Obama White House has used on two previous occasions to symbolize the administration’s policy positions.
The other ten included small business owners, twenty-somethings enrolled in their parents’ health insurance plans, a pharmacist, and both self-employed and part-time workers.
The article further reports:
The federal government’s most optimistic numbers, released unceremoniously over the weekend, suggest that fewer than 500,000 Americans have created online Obamacare accounts, the first step toward obtaining coverage in a healthcare exchange.
Published numbers of actual enrollees, including figures MailOnline obtained from employees who crunch those numbers for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, indicate a far lower total.
The Department of Health and Human Services has said it will only make the actual enrollment totals public once each month, beginning in mid-November.
I don’t mean to be cynical here, but I wonder if a glitch in the system will prevent the enrollment totals from being made public for a while.
