The Magic Number

In the last days of major league pennant races each season, sports pages report on the "magic number," the amount of wins by one team and losses by another that will allow the first one to clinch the pennant.  Right now, there is another sort of magic number that will surely be reported in the next few weeks.  This number is the total number of people gaining insurance coverage under Obamacare less the total number who have lost coverage as a result of that law.  Remember, the main selling point for Obamacare was that it would allow millions of uninsured to gain coverage.  We were told that there were something like 45 million uninsured Americans and that the law would cut that substantially with some estimates by president Obama's people putting the new number of uninsured after the law at only 15 million.  Right now, however, it looks almost certain that when the law kicks in fully on January 1, there will be more people who have lost insurance than who have gained it due to Obamacare.  We know that about 6.8 million individual policies have been cancelled due to the law.  Some of those who got cancellation notices were also offered replacement policies at substantially higher premiums, but that was not the case for the majority.  We also know that through the end of November, some fraction of three hundred and fifty thousand people purchased new policies on the exchanges.  We can parse the figures, but it certainly seems that the number losing insurance is about ten times higher than the number gaining coverage.

This number does have the magic power to make things disappear.  If it turns out that Obamacare actually reduces the number of people with health insurance in January, then the number will make even more of president Obama's support disappear.  We already know that Obama lied repeatedly to get this law passed.  We already know that Obama did not care enough about the implementation of the law to even check on how that effort was going.  If it turns out that the law has the opposite result of what Obama promised, it will be the final straw.