My must read of the day is "New health insurance marketplaces signing up few uninsured Americans, two surveys find," in the Washington Post:
The new health insurance marketplaces appear to be making little headway in signing up Americans who lack insurance, the Affordable Care Act’s central goal, according to a pair of new surveys.
Only one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private plans through the new marketplaces enrolled as of last month, one of the surveys shows. The other found that about half of uninsured adults have looked for information on the online exchanges or planned to look. […]
The surveys offer no evidence that the rule changes contribute to the insurance marketplaces’ relatively low popularity among the nation’s uninsured. One of the surveys, by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., shows that among people who are uninsured and do not intend to get a health plan through one of the exchanges, the biggest factor is that they believe they cannot afford it.
There are two big things I take away from these surveys, which were done by McKinsey & Co and the Urban Institute.
The first is that Obamacare is unpopular amongst the very people it was made for, seemingly because of cost. Kaiser Family Foundation produces polls monthly, and the last two months have shown an increase in an already high unfavorable rating among the uninsured for Obamacare.
In January, 47 percent of the uninsured viewed the law unfavorably. Unfavorable views "outnumber favorable views by roughly a 2-to-1 margin." By February the number was up: 56 percent of the uninsured held an unfavorable opinion of the law.
But those polls did not typically provide information that explains why it’s unpopular. These two do.
The second takeaway I had has to do with outreach campaigns. The White House will spend at least $684 million on advertisements annually, and millions in each state to fund the navigators program, which trains people solely to help people sign up for coverage. These new studies suggest that all of that has been ineffective with the uninsured.
No matter how much you advertise something, people have to decide the product is worth the cost. It seems the uninsured are concluding the opposite.