7 Million people sign up for insurance plans via state/federal exchanges (!)

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Lefties trying to credit Obamacare for private-sector job creation. Adorable.

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Nothing sounds more authoritarian than expanding access to health insurance for the lower-to-middle classes, freelancers, and those starting their own business. What ever happened to our freedom in this country to not have health insurance, show up at the ER anyway, and stick everyone else with the bill?

Job lock and lack of access to health insurance has been created by tax-subsidized employer-provided healthcare systems. You see how Americans consume oil, food, and retail goods? That's how we consume healthcare, too. Now imagine the government subsidizes consumption by excluding it from gross income, and they hide the cost of healthcare by dumping it on your employer, except for a nominal copay or relatively small deduction.

Obamacare strengthens the disease, to the delight of the virus, while suppressing the symptoms. Who could ever be against such benevolent policy?

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It sounds like you're advocating for raising taxes by shifting some income into the taxable bucket.

Now, which political party is more likely to consider legislation that does that, and which party is more likely to demagogue the hell out of anyone who proposes it and nuke the remains?

Eliminating health insurance tax subsidies would be offset by raising the personal exemption or by changing statutory rates. Eliminating counter-productive social engineering is the goal.

Health insurance is basically a microcosm for our economic problems. We've gone beyond the point of sensible policy, and now we are dealing with negative marginal utility. We are spending money to make ourselves worse off, like a sick person overdosing slowly on morphine.

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Wow, Obamacare has been more successful than even predicted! Thank you, President Obama!

If only the problem with healthcare were too few people receiving Medicaid subsidies! Our troubles would be over!

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Which is a small proportion of the overall coverage increases.

The rest was attributable to private sector hiring and employer-provided care

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False. Does not square with the fact that the uninsured rate fell dramatically only after the exchanges opened, despite job creation comparable to the year before.

Please stop making things up and look at the data. When the exchanges opened, the unemployment rate rose by about 2% as millions of people received cancellations, and then it dropped 2.5% as all of those people scrambled to get onto the exchanges. The ~.5% are the new enrollees. They represent approximately 20%-25% of all enrollees.

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So you admit the assertion that the law is a jobs killer is a lie?

First, GDP growth is less than the federal deficit, and unemployment rate is still 6.7%

Second, the "job killer" moniker referred to the part-time economy created by the employer-mandate. As unemployment has fallen, the part-time rate has not, particularly for the core 25-54 demographic. The jobs that existed prior to the recession are not returning, though the unemployment rate has declined.

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First off, 0 people were thrown off ACA uncompliant plans in 2013. I repeat, zero, ZERO. This is because the ACA mandates did not take effect until January 1, 2014. The people who received the cancellation notices were still insured until the end of 2013. So obviously, that can't explain the spike.

The data is right in front of you. The health insurance companies jettisoned as many high-risk people as possible, according to the RAND report, many were smokers. When healthcare.gov came online, all of those newly uninsured people bought coverage.

The decrease of uninsured rates from 17.4 to 15.9 was primarily private sector hiring during 2011 and 2012. Obamacare is credited with reducing the rate by .5% according to the latest data I saw.

Sorry, that's what it is. We're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Democrats managed to pass a new tax on Cadillac insurance plans. The rest of us with non-Cadillac insurance are reliant upon employers to reduce health insurance costs.

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What's the MoE in those polls?  Even with a minimal 1% MoE, pretty much all of the changes in that graph would essentially be statistical noise.

MOE is +-1%, but Gallup uses relatively sophisticated smoothing techniques, like follow up surveys, running averages, etc.

The Gallup numbers are similar to the BLS projections for insurance coverage, though BLS didn't model the spike in uninsured citizens prior to the roll out of healthcare.gov

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Paul Krugman annihilates the right-wing denial of Obamacare's successes:  http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/on-the-liberal-bias-of-facts/

Krugman presents no economic data. It's an op-ed, in which he does his usual stück: liberals want to accomplish things, conservatives only want to shrink the government.

His observations are true, but he refuses to acknowledge why conservatism surged in the 1980s--progressive policy had become worse than laissez-faire conservative indifference. Who is to blame for that phenomenon? Conservative Republicans?

Liberals are always fighting the conservative phantom. The real enemy is their own incompetence. Conservatism naturally ebbs and flows because skepticism and hatred of one's own government is difficult to maintain. Furthermore, conservatives have never succeed in shrinking the government more than 1-2%. To date, we have not found a limit to progressive liberal largesse. Entitlements have crowded out productivity, and the middle class are completely on their own. This has nothing to do with conservatism.

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The only point you're making is that Democrats will embrace ignorance, if it allows them to project an image of success. Also, it has been illegal to be uninsured since 3/31 so you can file all Gallup data in the paper shredder from now on. The number of uninsured will probably tick up as people neglect to pay their bills.

The enrollment rates are only a small part of the equation. The "deficit neutral" CBO report projected that 45% of new enrollees would be Medicaid eligible. Now Rand, BLS, and EDC (NY) are all forecasting between 62%-65% so you've got to conjure up more money to avoid increasing deficits.

We are all dependent upon the private sector to fix this problem now. ACA has merely jammed the throttle on full, and we will crash if the rudder is not repaired. This is basically what people have been saying from the beginning. If Obamacare works it's because the provisions are so onerous and irrelevant that private industry might suddenly rediscover its conscience.

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You're a rare Republican in that you concede that government action can spur private companies into doing the right thing when they otherwise would not.

Really? If the health insurance industry shows up for their annual pork allotment, and they get punched in the face instead, Republicans rarely surmise that companies will behave differently?

I think Republicans question whether punishing industry is warranted, and whether corporate behavior is controllable or predictable. From the liberal standpoint, punching business for presuming the continuation of liberal handouts is a great blow for "social justice", and socio-economic violence always creates predictable results. If Democrats always promise reformed corporate citizenship, it will always appear that Republicans are opposed to the possibility of that outcome, not the means to achieve it.