Monday Open Thread [3.31.14]

Obamacare looks to be working and is on target, with 6.7 million previously uninsured people signed up for private insurance plans as of today’s deadline.

Americans are signing up for the Affordable Care Act. And they appear to be doing so in really big numbers. As of the latest official update, last week, more than 6 million people had selected a private insurance plan through one of Obamacare’s new state marketplaces. But that was before a weekend of huge traffic to healthcare.gov and state-run websites, record call volume to telephone help centers, and queues outside outreach offices in California and even Texas. Charles Gaba, the Michigan-based analyst who runs the website ACASignups.net, now projects that 6.72 million people will sign up for private insurance by the time open enrollment ends.

In fact, Gaba now projects that we will officially hit the 7 million mark, as the law and the Congressional Budget Office originally projected. Indeed, the law itself has now covered between 13.1 and 16.8 million previously uninsured people in total, through Medicaid Expansion, the Private Insurance Exchanges (both state exchanges and Healthcare.gov), and allowing those under 26 years of age to remain covered under their parent’s policies.

A better way to measure progress is to look at numbers from a handful of states that are collecting this kind of data and have reported it. Last week, New York officials told CNBC that 59 percent of people getting insurance through the state marketplace had no coverage before. The numbers were even higher in Kentucky, where officials told the network that 75 percent of people selecting plans had been uninsured before.

And according to Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat, officials in Washington state who have studied their enrollment data believe that the overall effect of Obamacare has been to reduce the ranks of the uninsured by about 25 percent. To give you a sense of scale, the Congressional Budget Office has predicted that the Affordable Care Act will in 2014 decrease the number of uninsured nationally from about 57 million to about 44 million—a reduction of about 23 percent.

The next question down the road is how the law does in keeping premiums low. It has already lowered premiums prices. Keeping them low is the next challenge.

But, I still am amazed that the GOP decided to derisively refer to the program as Obamacare. Now that name has stuck. If the law continues with this success, President Obama will achieve something that only a few Presidents ever have: immortality. A policy of his will be remembered and referred to as Obamacare long after he leaves office. Roosevelt is known for Social Security. Eisenhower, the Interstate Highway System. Johnson, Medicare. Now Obama, healthcare.