via PolitiFact…
The Affordable Care Act -- Obamacare to some -- is a perennial target of Republicans. But at the GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee, Carly Fiorina made a particularly strong statement about the law’s ineffectiveness.
"Look, I'm a cancer survivor, okay?" Fiorina told moderator Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business Network. "I understand that you cannot have someone who's battled cancer just become known as a pre-existing condition. I understand that you cannot allow families to go bankrupt if they truly need help. But, I also understand that Obamacare isn't helping anyone."
...Reasonable arguments can be made against the law and its many provisions. But is no one at all getting any actual help from the law? We decided to take a closer look.
...who, in turn, asked someone who knows a thing or two about just how many people have been helped by the ACA to date:
Here are some of the provisions of the law and estimates of how many people have benefited from each. The estimates are from Charles Gaba, who has spent several years crunching the numbers for usage of the law at the blog ACAsignups.net. Gaba’s estimates are current through November 2015 unless noted:
• Americans currently enrolled in policies bought on the ACA’s online exchange: 9.5 million, of which roughly 8 million are receiving subsidies under the law. Another 2.5 million were enrolled in such policies during 2015 but have since dropped their coverage.
• Net number of Americans added to Medicaid due to the law: 15 million. This includes 10 million added through direct expansion of Medicaid under the law, 4 million new but previously eligible beneficiaries who signed up for Medicaid after the ACA passed, and about 1 million transferred to Medicaid from existing, state-based programs.
• Number of young adults age 19 to 26 who have been able to stay on their parents’ insurance due to the law: Possibly 1 million to 3 million, but the numbers change so often it’s hard to get a solid number.
Of the 25 million-plus total from these three categories, Gaba estimates, roughly 17 million are newly insured specifically because of the law -- approximately 5 million through the exchanges, 11 million through Medicaid, and 1 million assorted others.
Here are a couple of more ways people are benefitting:
• Americans no longer at risk for coverage denial due to pre-existing conditions: As PolitiFact has previously reported, between 19 percent and 50 percent of Americans fall into this category, or between 60 million and 160 million people.
• Americans no longer at risk of being kicked off policies for developing expensive medical conditions: Smaller than the previous categories, but unknown.
There is some overlap between these categories. But whatever the number is, it’s in the tens of millions -- and most of those people, Gaba said, "would disagree that it's ‘not helping anyone.’ "
I’m pretty sure the normal “fair use” rules don’t apply here since I’m the one who provided everything above…
Anyway, they also quoted a few other people; amusingly, even the CATO INSTITUTE GUY admitted that Fiorina sounded like an idiot trying to claim that no one has been helped by the ACA.
Meanwhile, here’s my less-formal annotation of Carly Fiorina’s response, along with some of Jindal’s yammering thrown in for good measure.