As the Obama-loving media echo White House talking points that opening day "glitches" at online healthcare exchanges crashed Tuesday due to a flood of interested Americans clamoring for insurance, they might consider what happened in Connecticut.
According to Congressman Jim Himes (D-Conn.), out of the 28,000 visitors to his state's exchange Tuesday, only 167 actually signed up:
Today, the CT health exchange @AccessHealthCT received 28k visitors, and took 167 applications for health insurance. Day 1.
— Jim Himes (@jahimes) October 2, 2013
For those that can do math, that means 0.6 percent of visitors actually applied for insurance.
If that's what President Obama and his media minions think is a success, one has to wonder what they'd call failure.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that about 2.8 million people visited the federal exchange at Healthcare.gov.
If Connecticut's percentages hold true nationally, this would mean a whopping 16,800 people actually applied for insurance at the federal exchange Tuesday.
To be sure, it is way too early to extrapolate with any level of confidence.
However, what Democrats and the media might be missing is how many people due to their ignorance of the law understand what awaits them at these exchanges.
For example, what percentage of the 2.8 million people who visited the federal exchange Tuesday thought they'd be signing up for free health insurance? Isn't it quite possible that's a very large percent?
Isn't it therefore also possible that when people see that they're actually going to have to pay for what they believed to be free they won't?
Consider that for most people that are currently uninsured, it will be cheaper for them to pay the penalty for un-insurance - assuming they even know there is one! - than actually buy insurance.
So before media members have orgasms over the number of people visiting exchanges, maybe they should concern themselves with the number of people applying for insurance.
After all, unlike a blog, Healthcare.gov wasn't created for the read totals!
(HT Weasel Zippers)
