The key to Obamacare’s success or failure — provided the administration can actually learn to operate the system — is whether it helps more people than it hurts, or hurts more people than it helps. President Obama’s promise — repeated as recently as this week — that the law will make the health care system “better for everybody” is clearly not true. What’s not clear is how many people will reap the benefits of Obamacare’s redistributive scheme.
There’s some new information in a just-finished study by the pro-reform Kaiser Family Foundation, which estimates that 17 million people who are currently uninsured or who buy insurance on the individual market will be eligible for Obamacare’s subsidies next year. That’s a lot of people. But then Kaiser adds: “We also estimate that about 29 million people nationally could look to new marketplaces as a place to purchase coverage.”
