Eight Million

The president held a press conference this afternoon to announce that the final number of health care exchange enrollees, as of this week’s close, is some eight million Americans.  Here’s part of what he said:

[T]he Affordable Care Act is now covering more people at less cost than most would have predicted just a few months ago. …we now know that the number of Americans who’ve signed up for private insurance in the marketplaces has grown to 8 million people. Eight million people. Thirty-five percent of people who enrolled through the federal marketplace are under the age of 35.

All told, independent experts now estimate that millions of Americans who were uninsured have gained coverage this year, with millions more to come next year and the year after.

…

So the bottom line is, under the Affordable Care Act, the share of Americans with insurance is up, the growth of health care costs is down, hundreds of millions of Americans who already have insurance now have new benefits and protections, from free preventive care to freedom from lifetime caps on your care. No American with a pre- existing condition, like asthma or cancer, can be denied coverage. No woman can be charged more just for being a woman. Those days are over.

And this thing is working. I’ve said before, this law won’t solve all the problems in our health care system. We know we’ve got more work to do. But we now know for a fact that repealing the Affordable Care Act would increase the deficit, raise premiums for millions of Americans, and take insurance away from millions more, which is why, as I’ve said before, I find it strange that the Republican position on this law is still stuck in the same place that it has always been.

They still can’t bring themselves to admit that the Affordable Care Act is working. They said nobody would sign up; they were wrong about that. They said it would be unaffordable for the country; they were wrong about that. They were wrong to keep trying to repeal a law that is working when they have no alternative answer for millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions who’d be denied coverage again or every woman who’d be charged more for just being a woman again.

…

There’s solid analysis and celebration from Chait, Krugman, Cohn, Kevin Drum and Jason Millman over at WonkBlog, plus of course many others I’ve managed to leave out.

A good day for America.