Thus far, at best, ObamaCare has achieved just 10 percent of the Obama administration's 500,000 new-users goal for the first month of the rollout of the health care overhaul. Significantly more people have signed up for taxpayer-funded Medicaid, but that doesn't do a lick of good for the private health insurance pools offered on the federal exchanges.
Not even MSNBC.com can ignore such a story, although the Lean Forward network reserved the right to spin it as best they can. "Health care enrollment falls short of expectations," noted the bland headline for Michele Richinick's November 12 story. "A report out Tuesday shows the enrollment numbers from the first month of Obamacare fell short by thousands of registrants," noted a caption on the network's website. Sounds like the journalistic understatement of the year.
As goes Medicaid, Richinick did make sure to include how the administration was passing blame on to red states for opting not to expand Medicaid -- which is, of course, perfectly within their rights and financial interests:
The Obama administration has placed part of the blame on local and state officials who refuse to expand the health care program in their communities. Their noncompliance costs about 5.4 million Americans from gaining access to Medicaid under Obamacare.
Suffice it to say, Richinick failed to include a conservative rebuttal to that charge.
What's more, the if those states did accept Medicaid expansion, then it's even much less likely that Medicaid-eligible citizens in those states would enter the private insurance exchanges at Healthcare.gov, making the argument a senseless distraction from the overarching failure of the health-care exchanges architecture.
