Is The ACA (Obamacare) Working?

Click here for an article in The New York Times by my favorite columnist, Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman, entitled "Most of the Way With Obamacare." He examines how the ACA is doing, not in the states with Republican administrations struggling to overturn or frustrate the law, but in those which have implemented it as it was intended.

There are three issues that, I find, most reporting on the program’s progress tend to ignore. The first is that the ACA was never intended to cover everyone – undocumented immigrants aren’t eligible, yet account for several percent of the population. Second, because signup isn’t automatic, there will always be some leakage, some eligible people who fall through the cracks. Finally, of course, a large number of states are refusing to expand Medicaid and in general trying to obstruct the law.

So it seems to me that to evaluate the program we should (a) look at states that have implemented the law as it was intended to work and (b) compare with a realistic benchmark.

The results are pretty encouraging!