Something caught my eye in Phil Marcelo’s Providence Journal article, last Thursday, concerning the Rhode Island House Finance Committee’s hearing on funding HealthSource RI, the state’s ObamaCare health benefits exchange:

Christine Ferguson, executive director of Health-Source RI, argued that the pool of potential payers could be much larger.

Another 247,000 people, she said, could be enrolled in health-care plans through the exchange, if more small businesses take advantage of a unique option offered only by HealthSource RI.

As I noted a few weeks ago, a projection of enrollment that HealthSource gave the federal government last May estimated just 17,000 Rhode Islanders covered through small-business accounts.  Even the more-optimistic projection back in 2011 only went so far as 77,000.  As of March 8 of this year, only 795 people had materialized.

Responding to a question I sent by email, HealthSource spokeswoman Dara Chadwick said Ferguson’s latest number is the entire market, in Rhode Island, for this sort of insurance product: “The 247,000 represents the estimated number of SHOP-eligible lives in the under 50 employees small group market.”

Asked if HealthSource intends to become a monopoly for small-business health insurance in the state, Chadwick replied that the organization is just “actively reaching out to small employers across Rhode Island to make sure they’re aware of options available through HealthSource RI, particularly the Full Employee Choice model, which allows the employer to select a reference plan at an affordable contribution level and then allow each individual employee to pick from any of the 16 plans offered on the SHOP Exchange.”

The silver lining of having captured only 0.3% of a possible market in five months of operation, apparently, is being able to say that there’s still 99.7% of the market left to conquer.  Be that as it may, Ferguson’s intentions in this direction might help explain her reaction (“What the hell?”) when she found out that UnitedHealth intended to offer a similar product to small-business clients, without government involvement.