If you think for one minute that O’Care is gaining traction, you’ll change your mind when you read about this North Carolina navigator’s debacle. It is hard to make up such stuff. How does math of 5,800-to-0 sound to you? Americans do not want O’Care and are not signing up. It is just that simple.
I have written in the past that it is White House hubris that ever imagined that healthy kids are going to swap beer money for cruddy O’Care coverage. And if the healthy kids do not sign up, our President is going to fine them. Presumably armed IRS SWAT teams will raid fraternity houses to gather up the kids and extract fines. Sound a little dramatic? Not at all. IRS abuse is rampant in today’s America, and yet, to date, Americans are too disorganized to do anything about the abuse. O’Care is the stepchild of the Democratic Party. And every Democrat running for reelection in 2014 is going to get a chance to explain to angry and frustrated voters why this monster was jammed down American throats with nary a single Republican vote. The O’Care Stepchild, the poster boy of 2014 Democrat reelection campaign. Sound like a winning hand to you?
Eliana Johnson reports in The Wall Street Journal:
To determine whether she is eligible for subsidies, the site prods Ms. Munier to enter her projected 2014 income. She expects to make $60,000 this year but isn’t sure. If she makes $60,000 from renting a house and work she does as an early-childhood education consultant, she will barely qualify for a subsidy. Mr. Myint advises her against making an educated guess. If she gets a subsidy and then winds up making more money than expected, she will have to repay the excess.
After about an hour, dozens of plans for which Ms. Munier and her daughter qualify appear on the screen. On average, the plans she’s looking at hover around $400 per month, but with deductibles far higher than her old policy—up to $11,000 more. “That seems astronomical,” she says.
Mr. Myint is prohibited from steering her toward one plan or another, and Ms. Munier, saying it’s all too confusing, wants more time to look over her options. For today, she doesn’t enroll on the exchange.
It’s a familiar experience for Mr. Myint. After starting Oct. 1, when the exchanges went live, his organization was aiming to sign up 5,800 people by the end of March 2014. It has a long way to go.
“We have yet to see an application from start to finish,” he says.
The current HHS navigator grants last for one year, ending next fall. Surveying the battlefield, Mr. Myint says: “I think there will be plenty of navigation left to do after this year.”
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