Affordable Care...

Obamacare Will Cover About 19 Million People This Year

By Kevin Drum

With the signup deadline now past, we have a pretty good idea of how many people will be getting health care coverage via Obamacare in 2015. Here's a rough estimate:

• +11.4 million: confirmed signups for private coverage.
• -1.8 million: likely attrition rate (nonpayers, dropped coverage, etc.)
• +9 million: covered via Medicaid expansion

The Medicaid number will rise throughout the year, and is higher if you use a looser way of counting. Needless to say, it would also be higher if all the holdout states joined in. For now, though, using a strict count just through February, the Obamacare total stands at about 18.6 million people—and will likely rise a bit more thanks to state extensions of the deadline. So call it 19 million or so.

That's a lot of people. If you got into politics to help actual people with actual problems, you should be damn proud of voting for the Affordable Care Act in 2010. No other legislation of at least the past two decades even comes close to its real-world impact.

(This is a good first step, but it is still a huge bonus to the insurance companies. The law forced people to buy policies that are either subsidized by tax payers or outright purchased by the taxpayer. People get some type of coverage but the insurance industry makes money. Don't believe the lies that they say that they are spending money on people who need treatment. Insurance companies are doing just fine...)