Obamacare Signup Numbers for October

I was interested to see the cool interactive map at TPM of Obamacare signups by state in October.

One of the things that jumped out at me there – not from the map itself, but from the text – is that about 80% of the signups so far are people getting Medicaid.  Jonathan Cohn reminds us that, however many people have to find different coverage because their insurance companies are cancelling their (non-compliant, and often grossly inadequate) plans,

…the best available projections suggest that 13 million people will eventually sign up for Medicaid. That’s a much larger number of people, most of whom had no insurance—none—before. That doesn’t even include more than ten million presently uninsured people expected to get insurance through employers and the new marketplaces, assuming all of the websites start working better, or the millions of seniors getting extra help with their prescription drugs.

Cohn goes on to make another point  that can’t be made too many times in this connection – that the number of Americans who could take advantage of this Medicare expansion would be about 5 million larger if only certain recalcitrant (GOP-controlled) states would allow it in their states, too.  Jonathan Chait makes the same point, colorfully describing the offenders as “states run by politicians with a sociopathic indifference to the basic human needs of their most vulnerable citizens…”  Indeed!

So yes, let’s see if we can come up with a “fix” for people who are finding they can’t keep their current plans.  But let’s remember at the same time that we need to do it in a way that doesn’t undermine the enormous good that’s already being done by the rest of the law.  The GOP has shown its true intentions here many times by now; it would be foolish to trust them with this one.