Sebelius: Administration Never Set 7 Million ACA Enrollment Goal – CBO Did

(CNSNews.com) – Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Tuesday dismissed the goal of 7 million Obamacare enrollees by the end of March as something that the Congressional Budget Office made up.

 “First of all, 7 million was not the administration. That was a CBO Congressional Budget Office prediction when the bill was first signed. I’m not quite sure where they even got their numbers. Their number’s all over the board, and the vice president has looked and said it may be closer to 5 to 6,” Sebelius told HuffPost Live host Marc Lamont Hill.

Hill asked if she agreed with Vice President Joe Biden’s statement that 5.6 million Americans enrolled by the end of March would be a good start.

“We may not get to seven million, we may get to five or six, but that's a hell of a start," Biden admitted last week on his way to a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Minneapolis, according to a pool report of his meeting, Reuters reported.

Despite her insistence that the CBO made up the 7 million enrollees number, as CNSNews.com previously reported, Sebelius told NBC News on Sept. 30, 2013, that "success," in her opinion, would be having 7 million Americans enrolled in the Obamacare exchanges by the end of March.

"I think success looks like at least 7 million people having signed up by the end of March 2014," Sebelius told NBC's Nancy Snyderman.

Meanwhile, the CBO predicted in May 2013 that by 2023, the Affordable Care Act will reduce the number of uninsured by 25 million, “leaving 31 million uninsured.”

“In our current projections for 2023, the ACA reduces the number of people without health insurance by 25 million, leaving 31 million uninsured (compared with 30 million in our February estimate),” the CBO reported.

Via: CNS News

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WH: Yeah, about those 7 million people we needed to register for Obamacare…

It was quite the weekend of, shall we say, managing expectations in Washington. Erika already pointed out that the original roll out for the whole, “if you like your plan” may have been questioned internally by subject matter experts and advisors, but hey… that didn’t matter. See, we never really meant all the plans. Just the good ones.

Another theme you previously heard from administration officials over and over again dealt with how many people absolutely, positively, without a doubt would need to be enrolled in the program in order for it to be able to stand on its own feet financially. That number, lest you somehow missed it, was seven million. We need everyone on board with this and registered in order for everyone to share the burden. But, as Andrew Johnson points out at The Corner, White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer showed up on the Sunday show circuit to say that the original number may have been more of an estimate.

Dan Pfeiffer, one of President Obama’s top advisers, played down the initial estimation that 7 million people would need to enroll in Obamacare exchanges in order for the program to succeed. He said the White House wasn’t going off of that figure offered by the Congressional Budget Office, but rather just try to “as many people done as possible.”

Let’s go to the video.

You have to admit, as targets go, as many people as possible is a pretty comfortable goal. You pretty much can’t miss that one, even if the number turns out to be six. But seriously, if there are any software people left in the country currently not working on fixing this debacle, somebody may want to build us a database just to keep track of the number of different stories we’ve been told about this program from the original bill of sale to present.

On a possibly related topic, do you suppose these shifting tales of woe could have something to do with The One’s daily job approval rating finally hitting 40?

Via: The Hill

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