Tomasky: Assessing Obamacare By The Numbers (great piece)

[cali]

As the final Obamacare figures roll in, the conventional wisdom still calls it a disaster. Yet far more people say they can live with the law than back repeal. How dare they!

Brace yourself, friends, for the new hate-and-snicker-fest on the right about the Obamacare numbers. It started over the weekend—actually, it’s been more or less ongoing since last fall—but it’s going to crescendo now that the enrollment deadline has been reached. Six million, eh? Bah. A million below expectations, they’ll say, and in any case a fake number. That’s what Wyoming Senator John Barrasso said Sunday on Fox; the administration is “cooking the books.” He didn’t reveal how he knows this, but of course he wasn’t pressed on the point


As of Sunday morning while Barrasso was speaking, the enrollment figure was edging close to 6.6 million, and by midnight tonight it might well hit 7 million. Conservatives will say it’s all a big con. Two criticisms have some merit. First, it’s certainly true that signing up isn’t the same thing as paying premiums on a month-to-basis. So we’ll have to see about that over time. Second, the percent of enrollees who are young and healthy is apparently a little lower than the most optimistic hopes (it's around 27 percent).

Those are open questions that can’t be answered for a while. But they provide no basis on which to doubt the raw numbers. There was a similar late rush on Romneycare, when nearly 7,800 Bay Staters signed up in the last month before the deadline, around twice as many as during a typical earlier month. And they certainly don’t demonstrate fraudulence. Unless the photographers who snapped these photos that appear on the White House blog are working under the same orders from Pyongyang as the people who allegedly concocted Barack Obama’s birth certificate, there’s nothing fraudulent going on here, either: What you see here, instead, are long lines of people waiting to enroll at sign-up centers in cities across the country.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/31/obamacare-by-the-numbers.html

[livetohike]

1. K&R

[Fred Sanders]

2. Pathetically lying about raw numbers and a thing called math is the final gurgling of a pathetic

party reduced to lying about anything and everything in the absence of any actual ideas.

The ACA and it's now inevitable success will be the final blow.....Democratic politicians need to run towards it, both the private and the Medicaid expansions means tens of millions of satisfied and grateful customers/voters, a declining deficit and a boost to the economy.

And justice, do not forget about justice for so many more.