The Republican fight against Obamacare is far from over, though they don't have a clear path to ending it at the moment. So right now it's throwing whatever they can think of out there to see what sticks, and at the moment going back to the furor over cancelled plans.
Boehner isn't the only Republican flogging this, with Sens. Marco Rubio (FL) and John Barrasso (WY) recently making the same claim. Is it true?
Of course not.
On its face, this claim by the Daily Caller is wrong because the law included a significant expansion of Medicaid, which in just three months has added 3.9 million people to its rolls. The article also incorrectly assumes that everyone whose plan did not meet Affordable Care Act standards but who did not sign up for a plan via the exchanges has been left without coverage.
In reality, many people who received notices that their plans were canceled were told they would be automatically enrolled into another plan by the same insurance company. [...] In other words, the person's health plan was "canceled" but the person was not left "without coverage," as the Daily Caller asserted. There likely was a seamless transition from one plan to the other, though the premiums might have increased because the ACA requires all plans to have the same basic level of benefits.
But wait, Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck says, this isn't about whether or not people actually have insurance coverage—most of it is better than the catastrophic plans they were in—but that there were "more private plans canceled than private plans enrolled in Obamacare." Which is not what the Daily Caller article he links to says, that more people have lost coverage than gained it. And while Buck and Boehner might potentially technically correct, we don't know that yet since there's another three months of enrollment. And it's also pretty much bullshit because the real bottom line is that millions of people are getting better insurance.
The millions that really matter in this debate are the five million left out by Republican officials in red states who are refusing to expand Medicaid.