Today's Numbers: The Bad, and the Ugly

HHS released the enrollment numbers for the federally run health-care exchange and most of the state-run exchanges today, the first comprehensive set of data that had been released so far. Bearing in mind that it’s the first month of enrollment, and we still don’t know much about the customers, here are a few thoughts on what they show us:
80 percent (or more) of the people who’ve gotten insurance so far have done so through Medicaid: About 400,000 people who’ve entered the exchanges have been determined eligible for Medicaid, while about 100,000 have selected an insurance plan for which they’re eligible (obviously these two statistics are not strictly comparable, but HHS juxtaposed them and Nancy Pelosi added them together). Hundreds of thousands of more people are set to enroll in Medicaid beyond the 400,000 group, too, because a number of states are rolling the beneficiaries of their existing free or heavily subsidized insurance programs for low-income individuals onto the Medicaid-expansion rolls — meaning the proportion is, currently, much higher even than 80 percent. This matters because, in short, Medicaid is a poorly run single-payer plan that does very little to improve health-care outcomes, but does lots of damage to government budgets. There’s a reason why House Democrats didn’t propose expanding it to much higher income levels than the law eventually did, and it looks like much more of Obamacare will be the Medicaid expansion than we thought.