How Many Obamacare Enrollees Have Paid Up?

A committee report by House Republicans claims it’s relatively few:

Only two-thirds of people signing up on Obamacare’s exchanges paid their premiums as of April 15, the US House Energy and Commerce Committee reported Wednesday. If true, that means one-third of people on the exchanges had not completed the final step to actually obtaining health insurance in time for the committee’s report.

Cohn calls bullshit:

With House Republican committee reports, you always have to read the details. And in this case the details say quite a lot.

The committee staff got their information directly from insurers, but it’s only valid up through April 15. As experts and industry officials quickly pointed out, that’s too early to get an accurate sense of the payup rate.

Remember, open enrollment officially ended on March 31. And, thanks to the Administration’s extensions, people were still signing up well into April. At the time the Committee requested the information, many of these people would have just received their first invoices for payment. Payment wouldn’t have been due until the end of the month—in other words, Wednesday. It’s safe to assume that lots of people waited until the last minute to send their checks, which means it’s safe to assume the real payup rate is higher than 67 percent.

Benen scoffs at “the latest evolution in the GOP’s anti-healthcare line”:

What started with “no one will want to sign up” eventually became “no one should sign up,” which morphed into “not enough people are signing up,” and finally “those who did sign up don’t count.”

But Suderman points the finger at the administration:

Republicans on the Committee are aware that the information they have so far is incomplete, and they are going to follow up with insurers toward the end of May. So we’ll get more information—eventually. But it’s going to take time. The administration could have headed off a lot of this sort of discussion by being more transparent from the start, releasing updates about payment rates, along with sign ups and demographics, and context about deadlines as well. Instead, they stonewalled and deflected. Which is how we ended with a Republican Committee trying to get this information themselves, and a report that at most suggests an eventual possibility of significant non-payment problems, but doesn’t demonstrate much of anything right now. For the time being, then, we’re left right back where we started, with no solid, comprehensive information to rely on about how many sign ups have paid.

And Philip Klein thinks the report “puts HHS officials in a pickle”:

If they attack the Republican report as inaccurate, it will be an implicit acknowledgement that they have numbers that they aren’t releasing. So their choice is either to stay silent and let the GOP-obtained data fill the news vacuum, or release detailed enrollment data. It’s way past time for them to come clean.