GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
In computer science, GIGO means that a faulty input will result in a faulty output. Perhaps GIGO in the specific area of Obamacare enrollment projects should be Gaba In, Gaba Out since many leftwing sites are currently singing the praises of one Charles Gaba, a blogger who is projecting incredibly high Obamacare numbers. And now the Washington Post's Wonkblog writer, Jason Millman, is the latest person to be enthralled by the very convenient Obamacare numbers served up by Gaba. Here is Millman singing his Gaba paean:
The Obama administration on Monday announced that 5 million people had signed up for Obamacare exchange plans. Hours earlier, a self-employed Web developer from Michigan had already predicted the milestone would be hit on Monday.
Meet Charles Gaba: He’s not a professional statistician, heath-care expert or political operative. He’s a self-described “numbers geek” who just wants to know how the new health-care law is doing.
So Gaba is not a political operative? Well, that's good to know. All too often folks in the MSM promote the work of some supposedly nonpartisan person and...
OOPS!
Several paragraphs down we get this self-contradiction from Millman:
He admits that he does have a rooting interest in seeing the law succeed – he’s a volunteer for the local Democratic Party. Still, he says he is just trying to figure out whether the law is working.
And now the biased icing on the cake:
“I do think the good outweighs the bad, but I don’t think [Obamacare] is the greatest thing in the world," he said. "I’m a single-payer guy."
But perhaps Gaba is really setting aside his politics and is making his rosy Obamacare projections based on pure statistical science. Well, let us now look at the "Gaba In" stats for the largest state in the union, California, courtesy of Michael Phillips of The Online Majority's Voice who analyzed it in detail based on a letter issued by Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California. First Phillips looks at Lee's claim that over a million people have "picked" a Covered California health insurance plan:
I have no quarrel with that number. I accept that 1 million have picked a plan. Picking a plan is just like selecting a book on Amazon. It goes into your shopping cart. Picking a health care plan on Covered California does not mean the person picking it is enrolled. Enrollment is a process, whereby one lists pertinent information, such as dependents, etc.
But what about the claim that 85% who have enrolled have paid their premium, Mr. Phillips?
This may also be true. However, the insurance companies did not say that 85% of those who picked healthcare plans are now enrolled. That number is not presented by Mr. Lee. Mr. Gaba assumes that the number is everyone who picked a plan, which may or may not be true. It may be 100,000, 500,000; could be more or less than either of those numbers.
Therefore if Gaba numbers are going In, then the result will be Gaba Out. And right now the total Gaba Out projection is, get this, 6.22 million. Not 6.21 million nor 6.23 million but 6.22 million.
It is no surprise that former Wonkblogger Sarah Kliff who is now in a cyberspace Twitter holding pattern until she lands over at the General Electric Vox Media is also in awe of "Wizard" Gaba:
And, as always, follow @charles_gaba whose accuracy on Obamacare projections is scary good. He might be a wizard. Who knows.
— Sarah Kliff (@sarahkliff) March 17, 2014
For those of you killjoys who refuse to blindly worship at the altar of Gaba, I refer you to Commentary Magazine's March Madness? Fake ObamaCare Enrollment Numbers which includes this heresy:
The president claimed that the number of enrollees has already reached the point where the law will work rather than collapse from lack of participation. But even if we accept his premise that falling millions of customers short of the announced goal of seven million is no big deal, the fact that hundreds of thousands of those being counted in the pool of those he’s counting are not covered because of non-payment of premiums makes his assertion a colossal fraud.
