#Obamacare fraud: enrollee count as legitimate as Chicago voter rolls

**Posted by Phineas

tarot magician card fraud trickster
“Trickery”

Seriously, if Amazon had done something like this, the Department of Justice and the SEC would be on their backs faster than you could say “indictment:”

The fight over how to define the new health law’s success is coming down to one question: Who counts as an Obamacare enrollee?

Health insurance plans only count subscribers as enrolled in a health plan once they’ve submited a payment. That is when the carrier sends out a member card and begins paying doctor bills.

When the Obama administration releases health law enrollment figures later this week, though, it will use a more expansive definition. It will count people who have purchased a plan as well as those who have a plan sitting in their online shopping cart but have not yet paid.

β€œIn the data that will be released this week, β€˜enrollment’ will measure people who have filled out an application and selected a qualified health plan in the marketplace,” said an administration official, who requested anonymity to frankly describe the methodology.

The disparity in the numbers is likely to further inflame the political fight over the Affordable Care Act. Each side could choose a number to make the case that the health law is making progress or failing miserably.

What Ezra Klein, the article’s author and an administration apologist,Β Sarah Kliff, the Post article’s author, isn’t saying is that the administration’s “methodology” is nothing more than obfuscation, a con meant to create a “he said, she said” game that distracts from Obamacare’s indisputably miserable enrollment numbers.

This is as if Amazon had counted every item placed in a wish list or shopping cart as an “item sold,” even if the purchase were never completed. Investors seeing the government’s explanation buried in the footnotes of a quarterly report would rightly scream for the directors’ heads. It is rank fraud meant to make a failure look less bad (there’s no way they can make it look good), though it isn’t surprising coming from the White House that brought us “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

The willingness of the Obama administration to deceive the American people is just breathtaking. It really is “Chicago on the Potomac.”

UPDATE: For some reason, I had it stuck in my mind that Ezra Klein wrote the article. Now corrected.

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

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