People line up around the block in El Paso, TX, waiting to sign up for ACA coverage on the final day of the 2014 enrollment period.
Charles Gaba
notes that California's sign-up queue in the extended registration period is 500,000, meaning that the final first-year Affordable Care Act numbers will be significantly above projections. From the
Mercury-News:
Now topping more than 3 million, the number of Californians who have enrolled in a private health care plan or in Medi-Cal through the state's health insurance exchange will likely rise by about 500,000 people who started but did not finish their applications by Monday's midnight deadline, exchange officials said Thursday.
After applying some math, Gaba guesstimates that the extended enrollment period will add 700,000 to 1 million new enrollees to the first-year totals, or 10 percent above projections at the lowest estimate.
Think about that—Republicans have spent the last three years undermining the law at the federal level. Republican governors have worked hard to sabotage key provisions, with particularly good effect in two of our largest states (Texas and Florida). Conservative legal challenges weakened provisions of the law (and in particular, Medicaid expansion). Conservative billionaires spent hundreds of millions of dollars undermining public opinion of the law.
And still, the law is in the process of crushing first-year estimates.
And as always, let's not forget that millions more signed up for qualified health plans off the exchanges (between 2-9 million), 5-6 million more now have expanded Medicaid coverage, and there are about 3 million under 26ers who have coverage under their parents' plan.
That's a lot of insurance Republicans want to take away.