Obamacare’s secret numbers are leaking out, and they’re looking very red.
Seven states and the District of Columbia have released age data, showing that only one-in-five, or 22 percent, of their new signs-ups are the much-desired, profit-generating younger people, dubbed “young invincibles,” according to a calculation by Reuters.
That 22 percent is barely half the 38 percent target sought by the administration.
Without enough young healthy people paying extra dollars into the system, the nation’s insurance companies will bleed red as they pay for the many older and sicker people who have rushed to sign up for the government-directed insurance.
In turn, the companies will ask the White House for a huge financial bailout, which will likely be unpopular, especially among likely voters.
The companies will also be under intense pressure to spike their requests for 2015 price increases during the 2014 summer.
Either eventuality will drop a political anvil on Democrats and President Barack Obama in the run-up to the 2014 midterm elections.
But the bailout may not be as expensive as feared because fewer than expected people have signed up for Obamacare.
By the end of December, only 2.1 million people had signed up for the government network, far below the December target of 3 million. Administration officials hope to sign seven million people up by the end of March.
Administration officials claim that six million people have enrolled in Obamacare, but that claim includes four million people who were notified they are eligible for Medicare. But those notifications include many eligible people who could have signed up for Medicare even without the Medicare expansion included in Obamacare in 2010.
The number of Obamacare-enabled signups for Medicare may be as few as 380,000, according to a recent analysis by RealClearPolitics. “As more people utilize the exchanges, we’ll see increasing numbers of “Obamacare Recipients” entering the system … for right now, the ‘4 million enrollees’ number looks like a significant exaggeration,” said the RCP report.