People Are Getting Insured

Devastating news to the Affordable Care Act haters: Obamacare Website Sign-Ups Said to Reach 100,000 in Month.

About 100,000 people signed up for health insurance through the online federal exchange last month, a roughly four-fold increase from October even as a team of U.S. government and contractor programmers was fixing the troubled Affordable Care Act website, said a person familiar with program’s progress.

...While far from the original goal, the jump in enrollment may be an encouraging trend for the administration and could signal that consumers are keeping an open mind about the new $1.4 trillion health law amid criticism from both Republicans and Democrats over the site's technical failures.

In October, I wrote, of the widespread criticisms with the rollout:

Look, I am not a huge fan of the Affordable Care Act. And I am not an irrepressible Obama cheerleader. (#understatements) But I have had it with this bullshit. People's lives are at stake. President Obama is trying to do something about that. It's a major undertaking, and there are problems, and he is acknowledging them and trying to get them fixed. Can we give him and his team, oh, I dunno, a couple of months or so to try to insure millions of people before we declare the project a failure and start impeachment proceedings? Jesus Jones.

Let's have a little fucking perspective. Goddammit.

And so it goes. The problems are getting fixed. People are getting insured.

This weekend, I spoke to an old friend who, once he gets enrolled in Obamacare, will have access to preventative healthcare for the first time in his adult life. He's in his 30s.

As I've said previously, it isn't relevant, on an individual interest level, how flawed the Affordable Care Act is (and, in my opinion, it's deeply flawed), because uninsured people's choice isn't between the more desirable universal socialized healthcare and the less desirable Affordable Healthcare Act. Their choice is between the Affordable Healthcare Act and no health coverage at all.

That makes it a pretty damn attractive option, given the actual, practical, immediate options.

This will save people's lives.

The conservative critics of the ACA aren't proposing any alternative that would save people's lives. So they really just need to STFU, unless they want to apologize with their filthy mouths for not doing everything they can to support the best option going at the moment.