White House Won't Release Obamacare Demographic Information

By Avik Roy

On Sunday, the Obama administration announced that a total of 1.1 million Americans have signed up for health insurance coverage on Obamacare’s federally-run exchange at Healthcare.gov. While that number falls well short of the administration’s original expectations, it is a big step up; as of the end of November, only 137,204 individuals had “selected a marketplace plan” on the state and federal exchanges combined. But the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services continue to conceal critical data regarding actual enrollment in the exchanges—data that will tell us whether or not Obamacare’s insurance marketplaces will ever end up functioning as they were intended.

First off, CMS won’t tell us how many people have actually enrolled in exchange-based coverage. As a reminder, you aren’t actually enrolled in a health plan unless the insurer has received your premium payment for the first month of coverage. Previously, we heard that only around 5 to 15 percent of SAMPs—people who have “selected a marketplace plan,” in CMS lingo—had actually enrolled in coverage.

In addition, in November, one of CMS’ top IT officials, Henry Chao, testified before Congress that the administration has yet to build the system needed to pay the insurers.

The most important thing CMS won’t tell us is the proportion of healthy people, as opposed to sick people, who are signing up for exchange-based coverage. If too many sick people sign up, and not enough healthy people, the average health spend per enrollee will increase, leading to higher premiums that are increasingly unaffordable for average Americans.

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