I was going to write a piece about this silly graph that has been making the rounds, purporting to show that only a few people stand to lose from Obamacare:
But Josh Barro beat me to it:
Unfortunately, except the 80% largely unaffected, these numbers are garbage.
According to Lizza, Gruber marks 14% of the population as clear winners because they are uninsured now but gain access to affordable coverage. That would be about 45 million people as of 2016, when the Affordable Care Act is in full swing.
But according to the Congressional Budget Office,the law will only increase insurance coverage by about 26 million people through 2016, or 8% of the population. That's the group that can be called "clear winners"; 14% is too aggressive an estimate.
Another 30 million people in the U.S. (9%) will still be uninsured in 2016.
Actually, he’s still too kind: A lot of folks with employer-sponsored insurance are also going to see their insurance changed, though not quite as quickly. And not “The benefits will get so much more awesome!” but “The Cadillac tax kicked in and we had to drop most of our plans except for the ones with high deductibles.” A friend who sits on the benefits committees of two organizations says that their experts predict that pretty much all plans will end up being of the “consumer-driven” (read: high-deductible) model once the so-called Cadillac tax kicks in.
