×
- President Obama's plot to turn the United States into a paradise for the proletariate is going precisely as planned. According to a survey conducted by the Gallup organization last month, the percentage of Americans without insurance has dropped to 15.9 percent-the lowest rate since 2008.
- Left-leaning analysts like The Washington Post's Greg Sargent are cautioning liberals not to get too excited. According to Gallup's numbers, the rate reached an all-time high of 18 percent in the third quarter of 2013
- At Bloomberg, Jonathan Bernstein concludes that "[t]he new data should, at the very least, make us slightly more confident that Obamacare isn't radically increasing the net number of uninsured. I wouldn't go much farther than that." That's certainly a lot of qualifiers.
- The rate of uninsured African Americans showed the largest drop of any minority group, from 20.9 percent in the first quarter of 2013 to 18.3 today. But results were less promising among Hispanics-the group most likely to lack health insurance.
- That may have something to do with the Spanish-language translation of HealthCare.gov, which seems to have been created with Google Translator. The very name of the site, CuidadodeSalud.com translates in Spanish to "Careful of Health" and the Affordable Care Act becomes the "Law for Care at a Low Price."
- It shouldn't be surprising, then, that Latinos seem to be waiting as long as possible before the March 31 deadline to obtain insurance. In California, which has 4.3 million Spanish-only speakers, only 5,500 have signed up.
- The right continues to take the rocky rollout of the ACA as an opportunity to pummel Democrats.
- The fight over Obamacare continues to play out in the states as well. In Louisiana, Senator Mary Landrieu has launched a petition urging Governor Bobby Jindal to accept federal money to expand Medicaid. "Our governor may not like the president, but this is not about the president," Landrieu writes. "It's about providing health coverage for 140,000 Louisianans."
- Most likely we won't know whether and how much Obamacare has helped the uninsured until the deadline at the end of the month, when millions of procrastinators will scramble to sign up. Or not.
