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What’s the truth about Obamacare?

Is it a success or not?

Those are good questions considering the deadline to sign up without penalty ran out at midnight. So let’s remove the partisan posturing and bias and just stick to the facts when it comes to “The Affordable Care Act.” The facts are the program started in 2010. But the sale of insurance on the exchange, a key component of the law, got off to a rough start because the website kept crashing.

I think it’s accurate to say it was a disaster in the initial days.

It took the administration months to finally get it working properly enough to start signing up a substantial number of people. And just hours before the deadline to sign up at midnight on April 1, the sight, overloaded again because of volume, experienced more technical problems which prevented users from picking plans.

Those who tried and failed will be given a grace period to complete the process with their coverage now beginning on May 1st. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office’s initial projection for nationwide users was 7 million people. As of midnight April 1st the administration reports more than 6 million people have enrolled.

So the truth is that Obamacare will likely approach it’s intended, initial goal.

According to CNNMoney.com, on Monday Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that insurers are reporting between 80 to 90 percent of those who signed up have paid. 85% of those 6 million adds up to 5 point 1 million enrollees; still close to the intended goal.

And what about all those young and healthy people who needed to sign up to make the program work; the ones needed to offset higher claims from older, less healthy policy holders?

Again, according to CNNMoney.com, as of February, 25% of applicants were between the ages of 18 and 34. That means insurers’ projections could go up in 2015 if they in fact misjudged the market and the ratio of young to old signing up. Bottom line is Obamacare needs more young people to sign up to keep premium costs down.

Now to the infamous, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” Turns out, that’s not entirely true. Most insurers have purposely limited the number of doctors in their plans to keep premium costs down. Is Obamacare costing jobs? Research shows the jury is out on that, again according to CNN.

So, is Obamacare a success?

Here’s the best way to judge that:

The whole point of it is to reduce the number of uninsured people in this country and that won’t be determined until next year when the data is collected from this year.

The honest best answer yet is, we’ll see.

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