Here’s a quick follow-up on my guess earlier this week that Obamacare will reduce the ranks of the uninsured by about 10 million when we finally close out 2014. The Urban Institute has released its latest survey results and concludes that Obamacare insured about 5.4 million people through early March. This is a comparison with Fall 2013, so it doesn’t include the sub-26ers who have been covered by their parents’ policies since 2010. It also doesn’t include the March signup surge. If you add those in, we’re probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 million right now, which I think is consistent with a guess of 10 million by the end of the year.
There’s still a lot of guesswork in these numbers, but this is about the best we have right now. It’s less than the 13 million the CBO projected, but it’s a pretty healthy number nonetheless.
UPDATE: It turns out that the CBO uses pro-rated years. If you sign up for coverage on April 1, you count as three-quarters of a year. If you sign up on July 1, you count as half a year. I didn’t know that, and it changes my guess. By normal human terms, I think about 10 million of the previously uninsured will have Obamacare coverage by the end of 2014. By CBO terms, that might come to 9 million or so.
