Jake Tapper is reporting that the Obama administration is not planning on releasing enrollment numbers on Obamacare until November.
‘We will release monthly data when it is available,’ a senior administration official told CNN. ‘We have not given an exact date, but it will be after end of month and we will work with states to collect their data to have a good picture of what’s happening across the country.’
But the administration has released numbers on the total numbers of visits to the federal site, approximately 8.6 million as of Friday, according to Health and Human Services data. A number cited as evidence of interest in the program. However, it is not clear how many of those who have visited the site were able to successfully use it, or stopped because of technical issues and slow speeds.
But they are already warning that the numbers will be bad:
‘We would expect based on experiences watching other programs like that of Massachusetts, that the first month number will be low, particularly since insurance doesn’t actually start until January 1. We expect the first couple of months is mostly people gathering information and learning more, purchasing is likely to come later,’ the senior administration official said. The official rejected suggestions that the administration’s reluctance to share numbers was because the website’s myriad glitches were keeping so many people from registering for health insurance, that the number of those who have managed to actually sign up is embarrassingly low.
Here’s the truth the administration won’t tell you. If the numbers were anything less than God-awful the president would be bragging about them across all 57 states. And don’t believe they don’t have the information.
If one were to ask any retailer how many units of any product they carry were sold between 12 and 1 this afternoon it would take about 30 seconds to look it up. I highly doubt that this president does not have access to how many people have signed up to his signature program through yesterday.
The real reason the information the number of signup are not available is that the numbers must be really lousy.