December’s numbers seemed to indicate that people were still willing to buy insurance at the new, higher prices. January’s numbers suggest that maybe they aren’t. Most worryingly, young people, who don’t worry that much about the health insurance they rarely use, tend to sign up fairly late in the game, so a rise in December and a decline in January means that the pool could end up substantially older and sicker than last year’s.
Okay, but why are liberals blaming all of this on President Donald Trump? The man was only president for a few days worth of open enrollment. Could he really have somehow caused 400,000 people to forgo health insurance?
That’s exactly what people like Charles Gaba are suggesting. The culprit: outreach advertising designed to encourage people to sign up, which Donald Trump cut. Gaba points out that many states who run their own exchanges didn’t see the same kinds of declines that the federal exchanges did. That seems almost like a natural experiment, which makes it persuasive.
Except: We’re talking about $5 million worth of advertising over a brief period, and it’s not clear how much of it actually failed to run. If HHS advertising is that effective, then they need to open a branch office on Madison Avenue. In other words, the eyeballing of the data looks okay, but the mechanism is frankly unbelievable. Moreover, if advertising, or some other federal exchange policy, explains it, then how come Connecticut, California and Maryland also saw declines?
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