Obamacare Enrollment Numbers Mislead

The number of people who enrolled in Obamacare has grown to around 365,000 through November.  This includes those who signed up in state exchanges and federal exchanges.  Some Obamacare advocates are actually touting this as good news.
I saw one headline on a newspaper that read “Obamacare Enrollments Quadruple”.  This is not an inaccurate statement.  The number of people who enrolled in November was about 4 times larger than the number who enrolled in October.
If you take almost nothing and multiply it by 4, you get a little bit bigger than almost nothing.
365,000 people is a significant number if you are talking about a gathering of people in one location.  365,000 people is a drop in the bucket when you are talking about a country of over 310 million people.
One of the reasons given for passing Obamacare was because of the alleged crisis in the number of Americans without health insurance.  We would always hear about how many tens of millions of people don’t have access to medical care (even though people without insurance still have access to medical care).
If there are 40 million Americans without health insurance, then less than 1% has signed up through the exchanges.
But here’s the big problem.  There are more people uninsured now, or soon to be uninsured, than before Obamacare went into effect.  Even though 365,00 people have signed up, there were individual states that saw about that many people lose their insurance because of Obamacare.
If this is considered success by the Obamacare advocates, then I will hate to see a failure.
We are facing a major crisis in this country.  This is having a huge effect on the lives of most Americans.  Even Americans with insurance through employers are seeing huge hikes in their premiums.
While premiums were already rising before Obama ever became president, there is no question that Obamacare has just exacerbated the problem.  And this is one government program where it is easy to pin the blame.
I really believe we are hitting a major turning point in this country and it will likely happen in the next few years.  The prices for medical care and insurance are simply unsustainable.  We are likely to face one of two options.
The first option is to go to a single-payer system.  That single-payer will be the government.  The government will get this money through more taxes and inflation.
While a nationalized healthcare system sounds disastrous, the system we have now is already disastrous.  I am just not sure if it will be that much worse.  I think it will be worse for sick people, but nationalized healthcare may actually be better for you if you are healthy and you can avoid seeing doctors.
The second option is to repeal Obamacare and then continue to remove government from virtually every facet of medical care.  While I don’t expect a fully free market, I think small steps in removing government funding and government regulations could help free up the market enough that we might one day see prices decline and care get better.
Ultimately, I would like to one day see a medical care system that is completely free from the government and we get results similar to what we see with computers and electronics.  We could get greater medical care every year, while watching prices go down.
Regardless of what happens with the medical care system in America, your best bet is to do your best to get healthy and stay healthy.