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Democrats think they know how to run the insurance industry better than the insurance industry, and they’re getting the chance to prove it under ObamaCare. Consider the early returns on its plan to insure Americans denied coverage for pre-existing conditions.

To judge by President Obama’s rhetoric, the insurance industry’s victims have been wandering the country like Okies in “The Grapes of Wrath.” Thus ObamaCare gave the Health and Human Services Department the power to design and sell its own insurance policies. The $5 billion program started in July and runs through 2014, when ObamaCare’s broader regulations kick in.

Mr. Obama declared at the time that “uninsured Americans who’ve been locked out of the insurance market because of a pre-existing condition will now be able to enroll in a new national insurance pool where they’ll finally be able to purchase quality, affordable health care—some for the very first time in their lives.”

So far that statement accurately describes a single person in North Dakota. Literally, one person has signed up out of 647,000 state residents. Four people have enrolled in West Virginia. Things are better in Minnesota, where Mr. Obama has rescued 15 out of 5.2 million, and also in Indiana—63 people there. HHS did best among the 24.7 million Texans. Thanks to ObamaCare, 393 of them are now insured.

States had the option of designing their own pre-existing condition insurance with federal dollars in lieu of the HHS plan, and 27 chose to do so. But they haven’t had much more success. Combined federal-state enrollment is merely 8,011 nationwide as of November 1, according to HHS.

This isn’t what HHS promised in July, when it estimated it would be insuring 375,000 people by now, and as many as 400,000 more every year. HHS even warned that it would bill private carriers for any claims if HHS decided that they had cancelled coverage to dump costs on the government. That outcome would certainly be in keeping with Mr. Obama’s caricature of rampant discrimination against the sick.

Yet that hasn’t happened. The HHS plan has flopped despite generous benefits and taxpayer subsidies that offset at least 65% of the total cost, sometimes more. Coverage is issued to anyone who has been turned away by even one insurance company or has been uninsured for longer than six months, and premiums vary only by age, not health status. In essence, HHS created a program that is designed to operate at a loss and still can’t lure the customers it thought would come streaming its way.

That so few have grabbed this lifeline suggests that the reality of pre-existing conditions isn’t nearly as grim as the President continues to claim. A shelf of academic research says the same thing, by the way.

But HHS won’t take this for an answer, so this week it said it will cut premiums by 20% and expand benefits for this program in 2011 to encourage more people to enroll. In other words, HHS plans to make its cut-rate insurance even cheaper (and thus more expensive for taxpayers) so it can avoid having to admit that the President’s claims about a nation of the indigent sick denied insurance were false. This wouldn’t be the first time that one government failure begat another.

Pre-existing conditions sometimes do lead to genuine hardships, and polls show that voters are worried about the relatively rare horror stories. More modest fixes could bring more stability to the individual market, while Republicans support a boost in funding for the high-risk pools that 35 states offer as a safety net. The government didn’t need to annex a sixth of the economy and create a multitrillion-dollar entitlement to help 8,011 people.