Thursday, October 03, 2013

ObamaCare: Lots of 'tire kickers' but few buyers

(My new American Thinker post)

According to UK news reports, there were lots of "tire kickers" but nobody's buying as they say in the car business:   

 "California, the ultimate blue state whose federal lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in support of Obamacare, turned less than 1 per cent of its Web visits into 'Covered California' participants on Tuesday. 

"We had over 5.7 million hits to our website as of 3 p.m. yesterday,' Covered California spokeswoman Kelsey Caldwell told MailOnline Wednesday.    

'7,700 consumers began their application process yesterday. ... 4,143 applications are pending,' she added. 'We received 23,269 calls yesterday to our service center.'     

Caldwell couldn't say how many of the 5.7 million website hits were from unique Californians. But assuming 712,500 online visitors saw eight different Web pages each, the sign-up rate was 0.58 per cent."

Now let me tell you this:  0.58 is a heck of an ERA for a major league pitcher.  It is not a good signing up number.

California was not alone:   

"Connecticut saw a similarly low rate of interest. Democratic Congressman Jim Himes tweeted after 8:30 p.m. Monday that his state's health exchange had 'received 28k visitors, and took 167 applications for health insurance. Day 1.'     
That indicates just 0.59 per cent of Connecticut residents who sought information about their state's Obamacare program on Monday decided to become part of it, according to Access Health CT spokeswoman Kathleen Tallarita."   

Maybe everybody will call back and sign up later. 

Maybe millions of GOP "extremists" were filling up the lines to mess up the machines.

Maybe this is all going to work out but it is off to a bad start.

At the same time, maybe a lot of people just don't plan do not plan to sign up.  We saw a report today that will not make the Obama White House happy:  

"Statistics worsened in the important 18 to 29 age bracket. Sixty-nine percent of the youth demographic were unaware they were required to get health insurance by January 1, 2014. This is the age group that Obama is hoping will foot the bill for the rest of America.   
In other bad news for Obamacare, 62 percent said they were "not too familiar" or "not at all familiar" with the Obamacare exchanges being set up by the federal and state governments.   
Such unfamiliarity grew among those currently uninsured today. Among the uninsured 72 percent said that are not familiar with the exchanges Obama is setting up.  
Gallup also found that knowledge of all aspects of Obamacare was quite low for those in the youth demographic."

Maybe President Obama needs to go back on MTV and John Stewart because the young people missed the message that sign up started on October 1st.

You can hear CANTO TALK here.





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