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.
