A lab rebuilt the Trump administration's Obamacare fraud check and found that ferns qualify for coverage while sick adults mostly do not.
A lab rebuilt the fraud screen behind the removal of about 750,000 Obamacare enrollments. Nineteen houseplants passed it, while most of the sick adults in the control group failed. The researchers plan to test a rock next.
"…and that is when the spider plant cleared identity verification," said Dr. Hal Brinder, my co-author, on Wednesday. Then he sat on the lab floor for some time.
Our study is simple. Federal officials recently removed about 750,000 people from Obamacare plans, citing fraud. That part is routine. We wanted to know who could pass the screen instead.
We rebuilt the screen from public descriptions of it. Then we ran it on nineteen houseplants. All nineteen passed. I need you to sit with that.
Our control group was nineteen adults with long-term illnesses. A control group is the people you compare against. In this case, it was also the people who needed insurance. Most of them failed.
Vice President JD Vance has said officials are "actually making sure that the people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them." By our reading, the fern is entitled. The fern is the ideal customer.
The reason is not complicated. A plant has no prescriptions. It never sees a doctor, never moves house, never has a paycheck that goes up and down. It never calls the help line to ask why its plan vanished. The screen seems to reward a person who needs nothing at all. We call this the Nobody Home effect. A plant is the purest form of nobody home.
The limits of this work
Our sample size was nineteen. Sample size means how many things you tested. We would like more plants. The budget office says we have enough plants.
We should be careful here. We may have built the screen wrong. That is the hedge, and I am saying it once.
The removal of three quarters of a million people from their health plans falls outside the scope of this paper. It was in the news. By most accounts it went smoothly for everyone who was not in it.
"The succulent picked a gold plan," said Marla Quence, the licensed broker who enrolled our plants. "It asked about dental. I told it it has no teeth. It said nothing, and the system logged that as consent."
Our p-value was very low. A p-value is the chance the result was luck. This was not luck. This was the design working.
Next Wednesday we test a rock. Early signs are strong. Its income is stable at zero, and it has never once been sick. Meanwhile the control group is still on hold with the marketplace. The hold music is the only part of this study that is not a plant.
