Afternoon Must-Read: Ezra Klein: Let’s Celebrate Medicaid’s Success

Ezra Klein: Let’s Celebrate Medicaid’s Success:

So far, Obamacare’s biggest success is the one that neither Democrats nor Republicans seem to want to talk about. As of Jan. 1, more than 2 million people had signed up for insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s insurance marketplaces… less than the 3.3 million the administration had projected…. Meanwhile, in October and November alone, more than 4 million people signed up for Medicaid coverage. This number will be much higher when December’s totals are released…. It’s ‘the biggest ACA success story that has not yet been told’, says Ron Pollack, head of Families USA, a nonpartisan health-care advocacy group…. If expanding Medicaid is so much easier, why was the administration so intent on focusing on the exchanges — and, for that matter, why were exchanges needed in the first place?… It’s a perverse truth of the U.S. health-care debate that the solutions that have worked both here and around the world are the only solutions the political system refuses to consider seriously…. What we’ve seen isn’t that the government has trouble delivering health insurance. It’s that it has trouble setting up multifaceted e-commerce websites that help people verify their eligibility for public subsidies, shop for regulated private products, and then interface with the computer systems run by dozens of insurers. Compared to all that, simply extending health insurance to people through existing programs is easy…

January 5, 2014

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