Remember When Obamacare Was About Insuring The Uninsured?

Remember when Obamacare was about helping people who couldn’t get health insurance find and afford coverage?

Yeah, about that. According to a new survey, just one in ten uninsured Americans are enrolling in Obamacare.

A pair of surveys released on Thursday suggest that just one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private health plans through the new marketplace have signed up for one — and that about half of uninsured adults has looked for information on the online exchanges or plans to look…

The survey also attempted to gauge what has been another fuzzy matter: how many of the people actually have the insurance for which they signed up. Under federal rules, coverage begins only if someone has started to pay their monthly insurance premiums.

And, the survey show, that just over half of uninsured people said they had started to pay, compared with nearly nine in 10 of those signing up on the exchanges who said they were simply switching from one health plan to another…

The McKinsey survey also found, as it had during the previous few months, that, of people who are uninsured and do not intend to get a health plan through the marketplaces, the biggest factor is that they believe they could not afford one.

Here’s the full survey, where you can find out that of the people who have enrolled in Obamacare, just 24 percent were uninsured previously. That’s not a great number for the sustainability of the law given that the cost of expanded benefits mandated by the law were to be offset by a larger pool of insured Americans. Tha so few people signing up were previously unemployed means the pool isn’t expanding as much as needed.

Meaning more cost to be passed on to those already insured. In fact, it seems that Obamacare has done far more to creating headaches for those who already had insurance than it has to expand coverage to those who didn’t have it.

By the way, we’re forced to rely on this survey rather than official government numbers because, despite Obamacare being premised one expanding insurance to the uninsured, the Obama administration seems uninterested in measuring how many uninsured people actually get insurance.