“The Commonwealth Fund has a new study out on Obamacare enrollment, estimating that about 9.5 million people gained coverage through Medicaid and the exchanges; this is roughly in line with some previous estimates but perhaps slightly more encouraging for the law’s supporters. Jonathan Cohn uses the estimate to declare that the law is meeting expectations in covering the uninsured:
… The Congressional Budget Office predicted that, one year into full implementation, Obamacare would reduce the the number of Americans without insurance by 12 million. That included the young adults who got insurance before 2014, by signing onto their parents’ plans. There’s been some controversy over exactly how many more young people are insured because of that new option, but the best estimates I’ve seen place the number somewhere between 1 and 2.5 million. Add that number to the 9.5 million from the Commonwealth survey, and you’re close or equal to the CBO projections.
Of course, the Commonwealth survey has a hefty margin of error and the CBO projections, revised to take account of the early technological problems on Obamacare websites, were never that scientific. But the figures seem to be in the same ballpark. That’s what matters.
In broad strokes, this is plausible: Obamacare has stabilized, it’s insuring substantial numbers of people, the disaster scenarios have been averted and most people getting coverage seem reasonably happy with it. I would only offer the caveat that when Cohn says “in the same ballpark,” he means “in the same ballpark, but probably lower than what was hoped for, which in turn was lower than what was originally projected.””
