Issa's at it again.
Hold the presses! We've got another
breaking massive scandal about Obamacare, uncovered by, who else, Rep. Darrell Issa.
The Obama administration included as many as 400,000 dental plans in a number it reported for enrollments under the Affordable Care Act, an unpublicized detail that helped surpass a goal for 7 million sign-ups.
Without the dental plans, the federal government would have had 6.97 million people with medical insurance under the law known as Obamacare, investigators for the House Oversight and Government Reform committee calculated, using data they obtained from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
This is a pretty dumb way to pad numbers, actually. Because as our own Charles Gaba says in an interview for this Bloomberg piece, at 6.97 million, they were close enough to 7 million. "If this is true and accurate," Gaba says, "they were embellishing a number they didn’t need to." They were also opening themselves to precisely this kind of breathless, stupid article, and to this:
"After touting 8 million initial sign-ups for medical plans, four months later they engaged in a concerted effort to obscure a heavy drop-out rate of perhaps a million or more enrollees by quietly adding in dental plan sign-ups to exchange numbers," Republican Darrell Issa of California, chairman of the Oversight committee, said in an e-mail from a spokeswoman. […]
"Instead of offering the public an accurate accounting, the administration engaged in an effort to obscure and downplay the number of dropouts," Issa said.
The administration initially reported the health and dental insurance numbers separately, then in September stopped doing so, and apparently lumped them together. So another bullshit Obamacare story is going to get played up by Republicans and the traditional media. Needlessly. The administration has argued all along that this number was going to be in flux because the health insurance market is always in flux—people come and go out of it as they have major life changes with gaining or losing employment, or getting married or divorced. The administration
says releasing these enrollment numbers this way was "a mistake," and a spokesperson says, "Moving forward only individuals with medical coverage will be included in our effectuated enrollment numbers."
As far as "scandals" uncovered by Issa go, this one is typically bogus, a needless distraction from the ongoing successes of the law. Which makes it all the more frustrating that the administration let it happen.