WASHINGTON – President Obama got a little mixed up Monday night and claimed 100 million Americans have already signed up for ObamaCare – overshooting the mark by about 99.9 million.
“In the first month alone we’ve seen more than 100 million Americans successfully enroll in the new insurance plans,” Obama told supporters on a conference call.
The president clearly misspoke or suffered a slip of wishful thinking.
His tally of Americans lining up for ObamaCare on the broken HealthCare.gov Website included 1 million that competed applications but didn’t buy a plan and 400,000 who could get Medicaid someday under the new law.
“So effectively, in a month we’ve already got half a million Americans who will likely have the security of health care for the first time in some cases in their lives as soon as Jan. 1 — and that is life changing,” he said.
In reality, just 26,794 people signed up in the first month since the glitch-riddled federal Web site covering 36 states opened for business.
Another 79,000 Americans enrolled on the online marketplaces run by the other 14 states and Washington, D.C., according to enrollment data release last week by the administration.
All told, about 100,000 people signed up in the first month.
The slow pace of sign-ups has cast doubts over the Obama administration’s ability to meet its goal of enrolling 7 million people by March 31.
The success of the health-care law relies on millions of Americans – especially the young and healthy — buying insurance to offset the cost of covering people pre-existing conditions and other new benefits.
That’s why the president got on the conference call to enlist his legions of grass-roots activists to help herd Americans onto the ObamaCare rolls.
The call was set up by Organizing for Action, his political campaign that now promotes his presidential agenda.
“I’ve run my last political campaign but I’ve got one more campaign in me and that’s making sure that this law works,” he said on the call with hundreds of thousands of supporters.
He suggested they use the upcoming holiday season as a venue for selling ObamaCare to friends, family and coworkers.
“As we go into this holiday season, we have to remember in the conversations that we’ve got around the dinner table, when we’re talking to co-workers at Christmas parties, when we are out there in our communities, our churches, our synagogues, all our places of worship – now is the time to remind people that we’ve go to make sure that everybody takes advantage of the opportunity to get affordable care for the first time,” he said.