- The government may have been sacrificed in yesterday's waning hours, but the Affordable Care Act's insurance exchanges opened for business as planned this morning.
- Obama was right: "The Affordable Care Act is moving forward. That funding is already in place. You can't shut it down."
- However, 22 states-mostly conservative strongholds-did prevent the Medicaid expansion part of Obamacare, a move that will hurt poor people of color most. However, there's still hope that some states will choose the stubborn alternative to the federal Medicaid expansion that Arkansas and Iowa have chosen.
- And, best-case scenario, if Obamacare ends up working amazingly well, other states might give in and sign up once they see how the nine states all health-care legislationed-up are doing.
- One doctor thinks we're on our way to halving the uninsured population-currently at 47 million-by 2020.
- And, as Atul Gawande points out, the law has already had a huge and positive impact: "So far, the health-care-reform law has allowed more than three million people under the age of twenty-six to stay on their parents' insurance policy. The seventeen million children with preëxisting medical conditions cannot be excluded from insurance eligibility or forced to pay inflated rates."
- Any glaring problems thus far? Well, the New York State insurance exchange website is getting so much traffic-over 2 million hits in the site's first two hours-that it's going wonky. One of the better problems to have, it seems.
- In order to have coverage by the first of next year, people will need to sign-up by December 15. Officialsexpect the rush to start in late November.
- Jonathan Cohn lays out other potential glitches, and how worried you should be about them.
- And here are tips on how to make the process as painless as possible, from Mitt Romney!
- And here are the answers to about every other question you might have. (and no, there are no death panels. Really.) ...
- ... answers that could be useful since it seems that no one has a clue what's going on, even if they seem to like what the Affordable Care Act is offering!
- And, to close, some final #realtalk: "Oct. 1 is just a start … not a magic date."
Daily Meme: Obamacare FTW?
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