About that Obamacare 20 million newly insured

A little bit of fact checking from Investors Business Daily:

Did ObamaCare Add 20 Million To The Insurance Rolls? Not Even Close
Health Reform: It has become a mantra among Democrats that 20 million people gained coverage thanks to ObamaCare. It's a myth. The real figure is much lower, and almost all the gains came by stuffing more people into the decrepit Medicaid program.

As soon as Donald Trump won the election, left-wing groups were busy predicting that, should he succeed in repealing ObamaCare as promised, anywhere from 20 million to 37 million would lose coverage.

And the truth?

While the White House derived its number using survey data, which it then adjusted, Heritage instead went directly to the sources for enrollment data — Medicaid and private insurers — to see what's really happened.

What they found is that the Obama administration has inflated the ObamaCare coverage number by almost 42%. The actual gain in coverage between 2013 and 2015 was 14 million, Heritage found. That's close to the Census Bureau's estimate that the number of uninsured declined by 12.8 million over these years. And of that, only 2.2 million gained private coverage, Heritage figures. The other 11.8 million went on Medicaid. (Heritage only has hard data through 2015, but enrollment in the exchanges was basically flat in 2016.)

Think about that 2.2 million number for a moment.

ObamaCare has caused massive disruptions of the individual market, forced millions to drop health plans they like, caused huge price spikes and mounting insurance losses, created monopoly markets around the country, and resulted in the virtual takeover of the individual market by HMO plans.

That's to say nothing of the enormous costs of setting up and running the ObamaCare exchanges and the trillion dollars in subsidies to offset the cost of premiums for lower-income families.

All to increase the number of privately insured by a meager 1%.

Time to drain the swamp. Allow competition across state lines, allow doctors and hospitals to publish prices for various procedures so customers can shop around. There is absolutely no reason for healthcare to be so expensive.