An Obamacare collapse had to happen. Socialist systems always collapse under their own weight. (Witness the old Soviet Union.) But no one would have taken any bets that the Great Obamacare Collapse would happen so soon, and so fast. Now someone is handicapping another idea: that Congress will repeal Obamacare entirely, as the House of Representatives has voted many times.

Obamacare collapse: low enrollment

Obamacare depended for its success on having many people enroll. Furthermore, Obamacare depended on a 9:7 ratio of “paying customers” to “paid customers.” (Any business that offers a customer a discount deeper than cost, is paying that customer.)

Neither thing is happening.

As of October 31, the site Healthcare.gov has enrolled fewer than 50,000 people. (That guess might be high, for it counts total on-line buys. That web site doesn’t acknowledge a new order, so people commonly order a plan twice, thrice, or four time, or more.) And that guess came from Townhall.com. The Washington Post had an even lower guess: 40,000 people.

Twelve State exchanges enrolled 49,100 clients among them, according to Breitbart.com. This does not include the Oregon exchange. Why not? Because the Oregon exchange is not “live.” Oregon authorities did not dare switch on a site that could not guarantee the security of a client’s financials.

The Washington Times summed up: enrollment in Obamacare stands at three percent of what authorities expect and hope to see by the end of 2014.

Worse, most enrollees are on Medicaid. That means they will get subsidies. Who pays for that? Blank-out. Literally blank-out. The young, healthy people who would pay the high premiums and not use the service, have not enrolled and may never enroll. Why should they, considering the cost?

Aside: Healthcare.gov is the only valid gateway to the Obamacare website. The government did not register healthcare.com, healthcare.org, etc. Scammers have set up sites at those domains. CNAV cannot even recommend healthcare.gov. That site is insecure in itself. But the other domains are outright frauds.

Obamacare collapse: telling people to lie

The Star of Life, featuring the Rod of Asclepius, the true symbol of medicine. Photo: US Department of Transportation

The infamous James O’Keefe came back. He sent undercover people to Obamacare navigation centers, posing as clients. And what did they hear?

As if the roll-out of Obamacare hasn’t been disastrous enough, Project Veritas has caught Obamacare navigators counseling citizens to lie about their income and deceive the IRS, commit fraud on applications by not reporting full health history, and worse.

You know a program is collapsing when its salespeople tell customers to lie to buy. This is the most ironic part of the Obamacare collapse. No one can believe what the government says. So now the government wants other people to join it in lying.

Obamacare collapse: more calls for repeal

That anyone is still calling for repeal of Obamacare, should surprise no one. But Stephen Hayward at Forbes.com now makes a shocking bet: Congress will repeal Obamacare completely before the 2014 elections.

Hayward points to the other part of the Obamacare collapse. Millions of people have already lost their health insurance. Website or no website, Obama cannot finesse that anymore. He already had to pretend to apologize. This after fifteen vulnerable Democratic Senators, and the head of the Democratic Senate campaign committee, demanded to see him.

The Senate, says Hayward, is the key. Of course: the House already has voted for repeal, moe than forty times. Those same Senators who demanded to see Obama will demand even more. But even Hayward admits that Obama will simply veto any repeal bill.

But neither Obama nor any cadre of Senators can stop the Obamacare collapse. Repeal probably will not come before the election. But if not, then it will come after the election.

Repeal is the only lawful thing Congress can do. Anything else will be a half measure, and will not work. No one can ignore the Obamacare collapse anymore.

UPDATE:  Democrats now give Barack Obama an ultimatum: fix the program in seventy-two hours, or they follow through with Republicans. Details:

[subscribe2]