Obamacare Private Insurance Purchases Top 5 Million

The nightmare continues for right-wing Republicans.

When the state and federal exchanges of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) opened last October, the computer system had some serious glitches. The Republicans were overjoyed. They had predicted the program would be a failure, and were encouraging people to not sign up for insurance under the program. And two months after the Obamacare exchanges started, it looked like the Republicans may have been right -- with there only being 365,000 private insurance purchases by the end of November (disappointing numbers by any standard).

But then the glitches in the computer system were fixed, and the private insurance purchases began to quickly grow. By the end of December more than 2 million people had purchased insurance through Obamacare, and by the end of February that number had doubled to more than 4 million. Now, only a couple of weeks into March, the number of private insurance purchases have topped 5 million.

The Obama administration had hoped to have 6 million sign-ups by the end of this month (and another million after March in this first year). Can they reach those goals? It looks like they might. Note that there have been nearly 800,000 sign-ups in the first couple of weeks of March. If they just maintain that kind of growth in the next couple of weeks, they will finish March very close to 6 million -- and it is more likely that the growth will instead accelerate since the initial sign-up period ends at the end of March.

I think the 6 million goal is doable, since people are running out of time to purchase insurance and avoid paying a tax penalty for having no insurance. It simply makes no sense to pay a tax penalty and still have nothing to show for it (no insurance coverage), and because of that, there will be a huge number of last minute sign-ups.

Of course this is a nightmare for right-wing Republicans. The larger the number of people covered with insurance through Obamacare, the less likely the program could ever be repealed without serious political consequences. And I'm not just talking about the people who have purchased private insurance policies. At the end of February, if you add in the number of people qualifying for Medicaid, the figure of people getting insurance through Obamacare was over 8.6 million people. I suspect that number is now probably approaching (or has reached) 10 million people.