Coyote Blog

As I did in October, here are the Obamacare Exchange activity numbers to date, based on their recent report.  Hopefully this presentation is a lot clearer than the report.

I know the nomenclature is kludgy, but it is the report that is a pain to work with.  No CEO would ever let one of his business units get away with this garbage.  The report shifts from visitors and applications to people covered by applications, presumably to pump the numbers up.  This means, for example, that the 364,682 number of people who have selected a plan is actually the number of people covered by plans that have been selected (yeah, awkward, I know).  Given that they have on average 2 people covered per plan in their application pool, the actual number of selected plans is half this number.

That is the kind of cr*p one has to put up with in this report.  Further, there is no actual enrollment data, just number of people who have put a plan in their online shopping cart.  Worse, they have a split of subdidized vs. unsubsidized in their applicant pool, but not for the plan selections.  How many of the selected plans are subsidized.  My bet is that it is a high percentage, which is why they won't tell us.  Someday we will find that few of these people are actually selecting plans they intend to pay for with their own money.

From the recent exchange activity report (I can't call it their enrollment report because they do not actually report enrollment numbers)

• Number of people added to Medicaid or CHIP:  803,077
• Number of people who have selected** a private plan:  364, 682

The Administration knows, but refuses to tell us what percentage of the 364,682 are eligible for subsidies.   By the unfailing rule of political life, this means the news is bad (ie the percentage subsidized is high).  We do know the percentage of applicants who were determined to be eligible for subsidies:  41%.  Since a lot of people who go through the process are doing it just to see if they get a subsidy, there is good reason to believe that applicants who actually are selecting policies will be subsidized at a higher rate, but certainly no less than 41%.  So using that number we come up with

• Medicaid or CHIP:  803,077
• Subsidized private:  153,166 (at least, probably more)
• Entirely private: 211,516 (probably less)

So, at best, only 18% of the people enrolling** in an exchange are doing so with their own money.  82% or more are doing so partially or entirely with taxpayer money.  Note that these are all people, by definition, who were paying for their own health care before, so the one thing the exchanges are definitely doing is converting independent citizens to government dependents at an 80% rate.

By the way, I am pretty sure the CBO did not score the PPACA as being "deficit neutral" based on more than double as many Medicaid applicants as private applicants and a less than 20% unsubisidized rate.

** These are not actual enrollments until the customer pays.  Essentially these are the number of people who have put a plan in their online shopping cart.

I did not want this to get lost -- in an Enrollment report that used the word "enroll" or some variant 229 times, the one thing the report was missing was the actual number of people who had enrolled.  On the Medicaid side, the report said how many had been found eligible but not how many had enrolled.  On the private side, the best we get is this, which is just a classic of the political art:

106,185 (10 percent) of the 1,081,592 total Marketplace plan eligible persons have already selected a plan by clicking a button on the website page.

The obvious language would have been "106,185 enrolled in a plan" or "bought a plan."  But it does not say this, despite the fact that the Obama Administration certainly has the relevant number.  What this means is that 106,185 people ... OK, a quick aside.  It is not actually 106,185 people being successful on the web.  This is the number of people who would be covered in plans "clicked on" by visitors.  The total number of clicks is well under this -- likely something like 60,000, if the ration of 1.78 persons per application holds from the other numbers in the report.  So this is the number of people covered in something like 60,000 plans that visitors did the equivalent of putting in the online shopping cart but may not yet have paid for.

Well, maybe the number paid is really close to 106,185.  Hah!  I can disprove that quite simply:  We were not told the number.  QED it sucks.

I'm not an affiliate, and I get no remuneration for plugging them, but I must say that Zappos.com is absolutely terrific if you are looking to buy any kind of clothes online.  Originally mainly a women's shoe and accessory store, now it sells all kinds of stuff.

Just as an example, my wife ordered some shoes the other day, and found them to be the wrong size.  She contacted them and got a shipping label for a free return.  Before we even got the box out the door to UPS, the replacement shoes in the correct size showed up at our house.

Guys, if you have not heard of Zappos, the odds are very high that your wife has.  In a feature that reminds me of the heyday of the dot.com bust, they are offering free shipping to arrive by Christmas for orders received before 1PST December 23.  That includes free shipping and overnight delivery of gift cards.

I wrote below that I am not an economist, but I am really, really not a patent lawyer.  However, I find this story totally mystifying:

Apple Computer may be forced to pay royalties to Microsoft for every iPod it
sells after it emerged that Bill Gates's software giant beat Steve Jobs' firm in
the race to file a crucial patent on technology used in the popular portable
music players. The total bill could run into hundreds of millions of dollars.

Although Apple introduced the iPod in November 2001, it did not file a
provisional patent application until July 2002, and a full application was filed
only in October that year.

In the meantime, Microsoft submitted an application in May 2002 to patent
some key elements of music players, including song menu software.

I have already become suspicious that the patent process as applied to software and online concepts (e.g. the Amazon "1-click" purchase patent) is broken.  For me, this is more evidence.  How can a Microsoft patent filed in May 2002 have any validity if it attempts to patent concepts already embodied in a competitive product on the market in 2001?

I once found myself in the middle of one of these patent battles several years ago.  I was on the management team at Mercata, an online shopping site who's bit of uniqueness was that it had three or four day purchase windows for various products, and the price of the product would fall as more people signed up to purchase it.  Kind of a fun, with some interesting viral marketing potential if it had caught on, but patentable?  I mean, doesn't Adam Smith have prior art on this?

Hat tip to Prof. Bainbridge.