Obamacare enrollment through the exchanges is 7 million and counting ... and counting. Thanks to grace periods for people who weren't able to finish enrolling by the Monday night deadline, the usual churn of an insurance market, and other factors, the true number of people getting coverage through the law will
remain a moving target:
That number doesn’t account for Medicaid, which has no set application period or accompanying deadlines. And a few recalcitrant states may yet take up the Obamacare Medicaid expansion. New Hampshire decided to do so just last week; Michigan’s expansion officially began Tuesday. [...]
The ranks of incompletes make for a long list. Nobody knows how many people will actually follow up and finish enrolling.
“Since this is terra nova, any estimate would be pure guesswork, ” said Paul Van de Water, a health policy expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Then there's another group that will be in the same risk pools as people who bought their insurance through the exchanges, but
aren't being counted with them:
... the people who have bought new health insurance since the start of this year but have chosen for one reason or another to bypass the state and federal exchanges that opened last year under the Affordable Care Act. While the exact number is unknown, some health care experts estimate that it may be in the millions.
What's absolutely 100 percent certain, after all the uncertainties and questions about how to count is this: A whole hell of a lot of people who did not have affordable health care have it now. Any discussion about uninsured Americans starts in a completely different place—a better place—than it did when Barack Obama became president, despite all the efforts of Republicans to repeal the law.