I’ve mentioned this in passing a couple of times, but it really deserves a short post of its own. We’ve heard a lot about Obamacare not meeting the original enrollment projections published by the CBO in 2010, but those aren’t the only projections that CBO published. 
They also predicted that Obamacare would lead to the loss of 8 million people from private insurance coverage by 2016.
But that didn’t happen. Thanks to Obamacare’s individual mandate spurring the purchase of individual coverage and its employer mandate spurring an increase in employer coverage, total private coverage increased by more than 16 million through the middle of 2015. The chart on the right tells the story. After four years of private coverage hovering around 61 percent of the population, it jumped up to 66 percent within the space of a single year.
Was this due to the economic recovery? Probably a bit of it. But the economy has been puttering along at about the same pace ever since 2012. The only thing that changed in the fourth quarter of 2013 was the introduction of Obamacare.
Bottom line: Obamacare may have missed CBO’s target for exchange enrollment by 7 million or so, but much of this is because it beat CBO’s target for private insurance by 24 million. This is great news all around since we’d always prefer having people insured by their employer rather than buying through the exchange. It’s better coverage and it costs the taxpayers less. On any measure you can think of, this is a huge and undercovered success story.
