Obamacare: Not the Time to Spike the Ball

There was a lot of news coming out of the Obama Administration last week related to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The Administration could certainly use some positive news about it and they did their best to capitalize and strategically coordinate the messages to the public. Quite honestly, I’m not sure how much was real news and how much was just an attempt to re-position their overall strategy with the general public. They have a lot of work to do.

First, was the announcement that over 7.5 million individuals used the different health insurance exchanges to purchase health insurance for themselves or their families.  This number miraculously exceeded the moving

target established to define the success of the implementation.  After the disastrous launch and rollout in October last year, this is certainly some positive news. Despite many questioning what the numbers actually mean, the Administration used the opportunity to spike the ball a few times while announcing it.

Second was the announcement that Kathleen Sebelius was going to leave her post as Cabinet Secretary at the Department of Health of Human Services. This wasn’t any surprise to most as she had stayed on much longer than many expected and as an added benefit she could now be used as the fall-guy/gal to blame future Obamacare problems and missteps.

As an added benefit, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) updated their numbers regarding the potential impact the ACA is having (will have) on the number of uninsured and the deficit. Despite all the changes in the law and the economy since it was enacted in 2010, the CBO/JCT estimate over 12 million individuals are financially protected with health insurance today that wouldn’t have been otherwise. By 2017 that number will rise to over 26 million. Additionally, while they can’t specifically quantify the number, they still believe the ACA will continue to have a positive impact on the deficit over the next 10 years.

I’m still not as sold on the Obamacare idea as I once was and you can certainly debate the meaning of some of the numbers being thrown around.  But, it’s the only defined strategy we have to work with right now. Until we have another real option (and just repealing the law with no replacement is not a real option) we’re going to need to fix what needs to be fixed and move on while we sort through the meaning of the numbers to see what they are telling us.

In the meantime, the Obama Administration should probably hold off from spiking the ball in victory any time soon. We still don’t know if this thing is going to work.