By Matthew Balan
ABC’s Good Morning America and CBS This Morning on Tuesday both picked up the Wall Street Journal’s Monday revelation about the HealthCare.gov website – that “fewer than 50,000 people had successfully navigated the troubled federal health-care website and enrolled in private insurance plans as of last week”.
CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell zeroed in on the “newest blow to ObamaCare – how the White House enrollment expectations could be off by 80 percent.” On GMA, Jonathan Karl underlined that this figure is “far short” of the Obama administration’s target of 500,000 enrollees. However, NBC’s Today ignored this development. Instead, the morning show devoted an entire segment to trying to get Vice President Joe Biden to be a co-host.
Karl noted that the under-50,000 number doesn’t “include those in the states that have their own exchange and don’t have to go through the messed-up website”, but soon added that “this much is clear: the number of enrollees…will fall short of the 500,000 goal that the White House set for itself”. He also reported that “the White House is saying there’s no need to panic over there because it’s a six-month enrollment period….But make no mistake, this is far short of where they wanted to be.”
O’Donnell previewed correspondent Major Garrett’s report with her “newest blow” line, and later stated that “the first estimates on the number of Americans who’ve actually signed up for coverage…are much lower than what the administration had hoped for”. Garrett spent much of the segment outlining how these “very low” enrollment numbers could threaten the future of the Affordable Care Act – something that colleague Sharyl Attkisson also hinted at two weeks earlier on CBS Evening News:
MAJOR GARRETT: …The administration has long said that these first enrollment numbers would be very low, and indeed, they are. And here’s why they matter: low enrollment figures, even in the early stages, could undermine the law’s financial stability, because if there are not enough consumers signing up, there won’t be enough premiums paid in to pay out the insurance for those who are covered who were uninsured before.
Also, we don’t know the composition of those who have signed up for coverage. If, in fact, these people who have signed up now are older and sicker – use more insurance – and are not younger and healthier, the system’s stability could also be threatened.
Editor’s note. This appeared at Newsbusters. The full transcript of Jonathan Karl’s report from Tuesday’s Good Morning America on ABC and Major Garrett’s report from Tuesday’s CBS This Morning can be read here.