Opening Day, Deadline Day: Home Run or Strike Out?
While today may be the opening day for baseball, today is the final day for enrollment in the Obamacare exchange.
In trying to navigate healthcare.gov this morning, it was discovered that the website was down for maintenance. The administration was quick to put a headline on the website that said the website would be slow due to a high volume of visitors to the website, but all along this is what the White House claimed to expect during the final days of the enrollment period. Why is it that all the glitches hadn't been worked out before the day of the final deadline?
Day after day there seems to be another issue with Obamacare, it is a far cry from what was sold and pedaled to the American people. What happened to the promise of affordable healthcare, keeping your doctor and your insurance, and a website as simple as kayak.com? As we all know, these three promises, along with many more, were broken. Many visitors to the website have waited hours just to try to enroll, over six million people have lost their coverage, and premiums are skyrocketing due to the lack of enrollment by Millennials.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Young America's Foundation polling shows that once young people learned that they had to provide personal and private information on healthcare.gov, they were 52 percent less likely to recommend Obamacare to their peers.
Since the rollout of Obamacare the website has been plagued with technical deficiencies. It is not shocking that young people are unwilling to enroll in Obamacare, let alone recommend enrolling to their friends. Young people are increasingly less confident in the federal government when it comes to the handling of major programs such as Obamacare.
The problem is that young people don't believe that they are better off under Obamacare, a YAF poll showed that 34 percent of Millennials believe that they will actually be worse off. The White House has managed to turn away the very demographic that they tried so desperately to attract.
Right now just over six million people have enrolled, but it is important to remember that numbers haven't been released on how many of the people enrolled were actually uninsured prior to enrolling. The latest numbers show that 6 out of 10 uninsured don't know when the deadline is to enroll in Obamacare, showing that no matter how many PR stunts the White House pulls, the message either isn't resonating or isn't reaching the right people.
I would be remiss not to address the fact that out of the six million people who have enrolled it is unclear as to how many have actually paid their premium--paying the premium is what would actually complete the enrollment process. It is not surprising though that the White House hasn't released any of these actual numbers because they know they're under a lot of pressure due to Obamacare's unpopularity.
It's safe to say that the White House won't pull off a home run by midnight tonight, but who knows what other scheme they have in store to boost their enrollment numbers.
