Well, Halleluiah.\u00a0 The Obamacare website is up and running.<\/p>\n
Of course, at only half a million applications processed so far\u2026 and accounting for the ones that the system garbled or couldn\u2019t verify or seems to have lost\u2026 and anticipating the tens of millions of Americans predicted to lose coverage once the employer mandate kicks in and it turns out to be simpler and cheaper for companies to send workers to the government\u2019s back-up plan (the one paid for by the so-called \u201cfine\u201d that Chief Justice John Roberts correctly identified as a \u201ctax\u201d) than to navigate the troubled waters of Obamacare\u2019s rules and costs\u2026 America should achieve the fervently promised universal coverage by \u2014 Oh, I don\u2019t know \u2014 how about sometime in the next decade.\u00a0 Maybe.<\/p>\n
I guess that\u2019s what you call close enough for government work.<\/p>\n
To think of it.\u00a0 A scant two months ago, 85 percent of the people in this happy republic had health insurance they liked, valued, and wanted to keep.\u00a0 Period.\u00a0 Now anger, anxiety and disgust fill the land.<\/p>\n
But, as they say on the late night commercials, that\u2019s not all.\u00a0 There\u2019s more.<\/p>\n
And that \u201cmore\u201d amounts to even more serious business.<\/p>\n
It is captured in a supposedly suppressed statistic I was told recently on good authority.\u00a0 You have probably heard that Medicaid sign-ups have dominated such early registrations as have actually happened.\u00a0 And you have heard that the problem with this imbalance is that it will bankrupt the system.\u00a0 That\u2019s before it bankrupts the states that, after an early payment holiday ends, will bear an increasing share of the cost.\u00a0 The cost of more Medicaid (which is free to the poor) was to be balanced by the dollars from all those now surprisingly scarce Obamacare sign-ups.<\/p>\n
But what you haven\u2019t heard is how surprisingly scarce the regular sign-ups are.\u00a0 As I say, I have it on stellar authority that a week and a half ago one typical state was three quarters of the way to 100,000 Obamacare registrants\u2026 of which fewer that two dozen were for regular Obamacare.\u00a0 Fewer than two dozen.\u00a0 The rest were for Medicaid.<\/p>\n
I can hear our friends on the left saying, at least those new Medicaid recipients now have some coverage.\u00a0 At least they have Medicaid.<\/p>\n
My response? \u201cHow callous!\u201d<\/p>\n
I have been teasing until now.\u00a0 After all, the whole mess is so Keystone Kops-like, how can you help but laugh?\u00a0 But the move of millions onto Medicaid is something else.<\/p>\n
Last week, I talked about\u00a0The Cure for Obamacare<\/i>, an Encounter Broadside book by Pacific Research Institute president Sally Pipes (http:\/\/amzn.to\/1fOpvLG)<\/a>\u00a0and linked to a four-and-a-half minute cartoon video (http:\/\/bit.ly\/1jeZYv3)<\/a>\u00a0based on it.\u00a0 Both lay out the widely accepted alternative to the president\u2019s impossible scheme.<\/p>\n