http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/34292-big-strides-for-health-care-reform
"One of the remarkable aspects of the politics of health care reform in America is the way that conservatives - even relatively mild, seemingly informed conservatives - have managed to keep believing that the Affordable Care Act is unraveling, despite the repeated failure of disaster predictions to come true. Part of the way this works is that when it comes to Obamacare, the captive media and the right's pet "experts" hype every bit of bad news about the law, but go silent when the news is good (and, often, when the bad news turns out to be a false alarm). How many people will even hear about the news that enrollments are once again running above expectations, and that the enrollment pool is getting younger? Anyway, it's really helpful to have a new report from the Commonwealth Fund comparing the actual performance of the ACA with pre-implementation predictions. It turns out that premiums came in far below expectations. (The 2016 premium hikes rolled back some of this positive news, but overall costs still look very good.) On enrollments: Fewer people than expected signed up for the exchanges, but an important reason was that fewer employers than expected ended coverage and moved their employees into the individual market. Meanwhile, Medicaid expanded more than projected - and the overall reduction in the number of uninsured Americans was pretty much in line with forecasts. So the program is achieving its goals, albeit with a somewhat different mix of insurance types than was originally predicted, and doing so more cheaply than anticipated. That's a big success story - and remember, the critics scoffed at those expectations and prophesied utter disaster."
