The number of Americans who have signed up for private health policies on the ACA exchanges passes 10 million.
Remember when the first million signups to health plans under ACA was news? I do, because I blogged it in November 2013. (Checked later and confirmed here.)
How things have changed. Charles Gaba, last Wednesday:
With today’s HC.gov & NY State of Health updates, total QHPs [qualified private health plans] have OFFICIALLY broken 10M nationally.
Gaba’s estimate for the additional increase to date in ACA-enabled coverage under Medicaid and CHIP (including bulk transfers from state programmes) is 13.16m, a number which is sensitive to definitions.
If the Supreme Court reactionaries uphold the crackpot challenge in King v. Burwell to the subsidies on the federal backstop exchange, they will be breaking a large second-best reform that, after enormous effort and in the teeth of systematic vilification and obstruction, actually works.
[Update: my link for crackpottiness only covers the legal arguments. Meet the plaintiffs of record.]
Author: James Wimberley
James Wimberley (b. 1946, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands. three adult children) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. His main achievements there were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He retired in 2006 to a little white house in Andalucia, His first wife Patricia Morris died in 2009 after a long illness. He remarried in 2011. to the former Brazilian TV actress Lu Mendonça. The cat overlords are now three.
I suppose I've been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I'm quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I'm open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia.
James Wimberley's occasional publications on the web
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