Despite promises from Democrats that the public would grow to love ObamaCare once they knew what was in it, public support for the law rarely came close to 50%. And far more said they'd been harmed by ObamaCare than helped.
"In many ways, it's working better than anticipated." That's how President Obama described ObamaCare in March 2015. The latest enrollment report shows just how wildly wrong he was.
The latest official count shows that 10.3 million are enrolled in the ObamaCare exchanges. That's down from the 12.2 million who were reported to have selected an ObamaCare plan this year, which means that nearly 2 million people (16%) signed up for coverage and then failed to make a payment on it.
It also means that there are 800,000 fewer ObamaCare enrollees now than there were a year ago. And it means that after the first year, enrollment has effectively flat-lined — each year, around 12 million sign up for a plan, but only about 10 million make the first payment.
The Congressional Budget Office — which is currently projecting that the House version of the American Health Care Act will rob 23 million people of their insurance coverage — had been forecasting that 26 million would be enrolled in an ObamaCare plan this year.
In other words, the CBO inflated actual enrollment by 152%. Even as recently as March 2016, the CBO said enrollment this year would reach 15 million, which was 45% higher than the actual number.
The CBO wasn't alone in its Pollyanna-ish projections. The Obama administration said there would be 27 million enrolled in the exchanges by 2017, as did the RAND Corporation.
The liberal Urban Institute had predicted that, if the law had been fully implemented in 2010, more than 23 million would have enrolled in the exchanges.
This huge gap between expectations and reality is important for two reasons.
First, it shows that so-called health care experts are completely incapable of predicting how consumers will respond to government health care mandates and regulations. So the fact that the CBO is now predicting that 23 million will lose coverage under the Republican's American Health Care Act must be heavily discounted.
Second, it shows that ObamaCare is hardly a "great product," as Obama kept insisting. If it were, we would at the very least have seen a steady increase in enrollment, not a flat line. Keep in mind, too, that ObamaCare enrollment hit a wall long before Republicans had any chance to repeal it.
The fact is that ObamaCare is an incredibly lousy product, one that is only barely tolerable even with massive government subsidies. (Which is why, outside of those income groups eligible for the biggest subsidies, almost no one is buying coverage inside the exchanges.)