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The Success of the First ACA Open Enrollment

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Fundamentally good news:

President Obama on Thursday announced the final numbers for the Affordable Care Act’s open enrollment period.

Eight million people have signed up for private insurance plans through the new federal and state marketplaces. And within the federal marketplaces, 28 percent of enrollees are ages 18 to 34.

This is good news—very, very good news.

Granted, Real Progressives understand that reducing the number of uninsured is just horse race politics with no policy consequences, but for the rest of us this is a good outcome. And remember that were it not for the Taney Roberts Court and Republican statehouses, the numbers would be substantially higher.

And as Sarah Kilff says, the takeway is straightforward:

There’s a very simple reason that Obamacare hit 8 million sign-ups: Being uninsured is horrible.

But the political conversation over Obamacare was driven almost entirely by people who had, and knew they would be able to keep, their health insurance. It was filled with a lot of assumptions, theories, and speculations about what people who didn’t have good insurance, or any insurance, would do. And after Obamacare’s disastrous launch, the theory took hold that these people wouldn’t find this untested program worth the trouble. It was the permanently insured speculating about the uninsured and the barely insured – and, unsurprisingly, they got it wrong.

And for this reason, people who think it would be better for millions of people to go uninsured than for a rentier to skim a buck off the top are making a grotesquely immoral argument. “Incremental reform” might sound weak, but in this case it will mean alleviating substantial amounts of suffering and anxiety.

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