some would miss Obamacare

Critics of the ACA are so insistent on pointing to the problems it has encountered — erroneous tax information to 800,000 taxpayers is the latest — that it was especially enlightening to talk on Friday with Sylvia Mathews Burwell,the secretary of Health and Human Services.

What does Obamacare mean at many of those kitchen tables? Because of the law, at least 10 million fewer Americans are uninsured — and that’s a conservative number. The drop in the nation’s uninsured rate is the largest since the early 1970s, when Medicaid was still taking hold and both Medicare and Medicaid were expanded to cover people with disabilities.

These aren’t just government numbers. Here is what Gallup said in January: “The uninsured rate has dropped 4.2 percentage points since the Affordable Care Act’s requirement for Americans to have health insurance went into effect one year ago.”

Gallup might have mentioned not just the mandate but also the financial help many Americans have received to buy coverage under the ACA. Some more numbers: 87 percent of the people who signed up on the exchanges qualified for subsidies, and the average assistance to each was $268 per month. Perhaps some out there would rather not have government help people buy health insurance, but this seems to me a good and decent use of our tax money.

We don’t talk about it much, but by closing the “doughnut hole” in the Medicare drug program, thus providing more help, the law has saved 8.2 million seniors over $11 billion since 2010. That comes to $1,407 per beneficiary. How many elderly Americans want that to go away? This is something else that “repealing Obamacare” would mean.

Are you a budget hawk? The slowdown in Medicare cost inflation between 2009 and 2012 saved the government $116.4 billion. Burwell is way too careful a wonk to claim that all this was caused by the health-care law, but largely good things have happened — including, by the way, to employment — since it passed. Its critics predicted all sorts of catastrophes. They were wrong.

I am sorry to burden you with all these numbers, but the arguments you usually hear about the law are remarkably fact-free. As Burwell says, they typically focus on a single word — that would be “Obamacare” — not what the law does.

-- E.J. Dionne, MidWeek, March 4, 2015