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ADMINISTRATION STOPS MONTHLY ACA ENROLLMENT REPORTS: Kyle Cheney with today’s top read [http://politico.pro/1qVCBjd] — “The Obama administration has quietly decided to halt its monthly updates on Obamacare enrollment, which were a major pipeline of information about the impact of the health law heading into the 2014 campaign season. ‘HHS issued monthly enrollment reports during the first marketplace open enrollment period in order to provide the best understanding of enrollment activities as it was taking place,’ an HHS spokeswoman emailed. ‘Now that this time period has ended, we will look at future opportunities to share information about the marketplace that is...

Affordable Care Act: President Obama has for a while been bragging that 8 million people have signed up for ObamaCare. But the administration still hasn't released the state-by-state numbers to back up that number. You'd think that with such good news, the administration would want to put out as many details as possible, as soon as possible. But judging by previous months, the latest Health and Human Services enrollment report is now nearly two weeks behind schedule. As a result, we still don't know where 2.7 million ObamaCare enrollees came from. Here's what we do know

Changes to this year's census will make it difficult to assess how many people gained health insurance as a result of ObamaCare's first year of open enrollment, according to a report. The reported overhaul of census questions on health insurance arrives as politicians, journalists and researchers await official data on how many people gained and lost coverage in the last year. The changes are reportedly intended to improve the survey's accuracy. They will likely mark a "break in trend" for census health insurance data, making it hard to compared the 2014 report to past reports. The revisions and their potential...

As Minnesota's legislative auditor announced Wednesday a full evaluation of MNsure, state officials revealed plans to address a key question: Did the federal health law reduce the number of Minnesotans lacking coverage. MNsure has asked University of Minnesota researchers to work with insurance companies and the state Department of Human Services to provide a preliminary estimate for the impact of the federal Affordable Care Act on the uninsured rate in Minnesota. The most recent estimate suggests about 445,000 Minnesotans lacked coverage last year. Projections last year suggested the health law would reduce that number to between 159,000 and 201,000 by...

Bias: The media are cheering a survey that, they say, shows ObamaCare is working miracles. It shows nothing of the kind. Meanwhile, they're ignoring another report that finds ObamaCare-induced premium spikes. 'Millions More People Are Getting Health Insurance Because Of ObamaCare," screams a headline on the left-wing Huffington Post. Countless other major news outlets more or less echoed this line, calling it a big win for ObamaCare. They and others are all talking about a Rand Corp. survey that, in fact, finds no such thing.

Which is worse about this story? Is it that only 6,666 people in Alaska have signed up in ObamaCare, or that it’s only the fifth-lowest total among states? The state estimated that more than 139,000 Alaskans would have eligibility to enroll in ObamaCare, but with the deadline approaching for enforcement — kind of, anyway — only five percent of them have done so, reports the Alaska Daily News (via Salena Zito): In less than two weeks, the health insurance marketplace will close, shutting out Alaskans until the next enrollment cycle and imposing fines on some of the uninsured.Nearly 5 percent...

Despite spending over half-a-billion dollars on increasingly mind-blowing promotions for Obamacare, a new survey released today shows that even the website apparently fixed, over one-third of Americans without insurance say they plan to stay that way, even after being told that the new law requires them to get covered or pay a penalty. As CBS notes, some 46% of those surveyed also were unaware of the March 31 deadline for being insured as it seems "low-income, young families may have been overlooked. They're probably not spending a lot of time watching television, they never read a newspaper and if they...

As the White House scrambles to get people signed up for health insurance before the March 31 deadline, many uninsured Americans say they are still planning to take their chances and remain without coverage. A new study by Bankrate.com shows that about one third of uninsured Americans are going to remain without coverage and opt to pay the penalty. The survey results suggest that the administration’s outreach to uninsured people may be falling short, with more than half of people without insurance unaware of the March 31 deadline—and even more unaware of subsidies that could make their policies more affordable....

The big headline from the report: 15.9 percent of adults are now uninsured, down from 17.1 percent at the end of 2013. It's news that the Obama administration and the law's supporters are going to cheer as proof that the Affordable Care Act is working, and you'll likely hear a lot about it this week. The uninsured rate for the highly scrutinized 18-34 year-old demographic is dropping, but not yet to the levels the administration hopes for. The uninsured rate among 18-25 year-olds is now 23 percent, down from 23.5 percent, and the rate for 26 to 34 year-olds dropped...

Defenders of Obamacare will point to a new Gallup poll showing that the percentage of Americans without health insurance continues to fall -- to 15.9 percent so far in 2014, down from 17.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013. But compare the most recent percentages with those posted by Gallup in 2008, when 14.8 percent of Americans lacked health insurance coverage. In fact, as Gallup has previously reported, "The number of uninsured was generally below 15% in 2008 until it began to increase in November of that year, coincident with the worst of the economic crisis."

A new survey confirms that the “Affordable Care Act” has failed to achieve one of its most important goals — making health coverage accessible to the uninsured. As the Washington Post reports, “Just one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private health plans through the new marketplace have signed up for one.” Why so few? According to the survey, which was released last Thursday by McKinsey & Company, the most common reason cited by uninsured respondents was lack of affordability. Out of five possible reasons for failing to enroll, most chose, “I could not afford to pay the premium.”

ObamaCare isnÂ’t achieving its primary goal of extending coverage to the uninsured, according to a new study. The survey released Thursday by the McKinsey & Co. consulting firm found that only 27 percent of people who have selected a plan on the new exchanges didnÂ’t previously have coverage. The Obama administration says 4 million people have selected a plan since the exchanges launched on Oct. 1, but has not said how many of them already had an insurance plan. At a healthcare industry conference on Thursday, Gary Cohen, a top official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS),...

The new health insurance marketplaces appear to be making little headway so far in signing up Americans who lack health insurance, the Affordable Care Act’s central goal. A pair of surveys released on Thursday suggest that just one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private health plans through the new marketplace have signed up for one — and that about half of uninsured adults has looked for information on the online exchanges or plans to look. Taken together, the snapshots shown by the surveys provide preliminary answers to what has been one of the biggest mysteries since HealthCare.gov and...

Health Care: A new survey shows that ObamaCare is less popular with the uninsured than with the public. How is this even possible? The January Kaiser Family Foundation health tracking poll shows that just 24% of the uninsured approve of ObamaCare. That's down from 40% the month before the reform officially launched in October, and it's a full 10 points below the public's overall favorable rating. Incredibly, more than twice as many uninsured say they're worse off because of ObamaCare than say it's helped. What's more, just 7% of the uninsured say they tried to get coverage through an ObamaCare...

Just cause they've signed up for Obamacare doesn't mean they're covered. Around one in five people who picked health insurance policies on the state and federal exchanges last year haven't paid their first month's premiums, according to insurers polled by CNNMoney. These folks will likely see their policy selection canceled and they'll be left uninsured. Some 2.1 million people signed up for a plan in time for their coverage to start January 1, according to the Obama administration. But with the payment deadlines stretching until January 31 at the latest, anywhere between 12% and 30% of those folks still haven't...

Today’s Kaiser tracking poll shows support for Obamacare plummeting — not with just anyone, but within the 15 percent of the population that is uninsured, the very people the law was supposed to help. The rise in disapproval of the law from November is pretty big, but the drop in approval is even bigger...

Behold, your chart of the day. This comes from Kaiser Health News, which has regularly polled on health-related policies, and in particular the uninsured in relation to ObamaCare. Since 2011, the support and opposition have remained fairly close together, but now that ObamaCare has been implemented, a dramatic change has taken place — and one the White House and Democrats won’t like:KHN says, presumably without irony, that the reason for the sudden shift is unclear: Uninsured Americans — the people that the Affordable Care Act was designed to most aid — are increasingly critical of the law as its key...

900,000 Californians lost their health plans by January 1; only 500,000 signed up on the Obamacare exchange. Health care industry expert Bob Laszewski points out that that means at least 330,000 of the 500,000 people who signed up for Obamacare already had health insurance. "If you want to know how many uninsured bought it, subtract by at least" 330,000, Laszewski told THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Failure: ObamaCare is driving millions of people into Medicaid, a program we now know does nothing to improve health and actually drives emergency-room use higher. A central premise of ObamaCare was that vastly expanding Medicaid would ultimately save health care dollars. The millions of uninsured gaining access to Medicaid would no longer crowd costly emergency rooms looking for care, the thinking went. And that improved access would keep them healthier. Turns out that neither of those claims is true.

A more recent independent study estimates 30 million uninsured at the end of Obama’s second term, and finds, remarkably, that the uninsured will have the same features (poor, Hispanic, young) as before ObamaCare. And I thought the primary goal of ObamaCare was to insure everyone, not to leave close to 30 million uninsured behind! These two projections raise the question: How can ObamaCare raise the number of insured by 30 million as it leaves some 30 million uninsured?