“Big Fucking Deal”

For the first time, the rate of those without medical insurance has dropped below 9%:

Fewer Americans are uninsured than ever before, new federal data shows.

Quarterly numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) show that the uninsured rate fell to 8.6 percent during the first three months of 2016. That’s the lowest rate the government has on record.

The NCHS data shows states that chose to expand Medicaid programs have cut their uninsured rate in half, while states that opted out of Medicaid expansion programs have not seen as dramatic of a decline.

I hope you will not unfairly demonize kindly, moderate Republicans like John McCain and Mitt Romney and Sam Alito merely because their actions would have caused the number of uninsured to head back towards 20% — what’s tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and untold unnecessary bankruptcies between friends, really? Please leave the benevolent Republican state overlords who are refusing the Medicaid expansion alone too — they hardly represent the historically unprecedented threat to democratic governance that Democrats have routinely asserted they are, and if you were a Louisiana voter in 2015 you should have written in Steve Zahn’s character from Treme.

…and, rather than replying to multiple comments let me say that while the ACA was a yoooge achievement obviously there are serious remaining problems with the American health care system and the ACA cannot be the endgame.