Californians Love Obamacare as 15,000 a Day Signed Up In Past Week

Sadly for the GOP, but wonderfully for the rest of the country not rooting for the failure of the health care law due to the hatred of a black President, enrollments for the ACA have continued to surge all across the nation. In states that setup their own online health exchanges, signups are doing even better than the nation at large (Imagine that!) In New York, between 4,000 and 5,000 people a day enrolled in a health care plan or were deemed eligible for Medicaid this month. State officials have said that they’ve seen enrollments increase 34% in the past week.

Meanwhile, in Connecticut, they’ve signed up 47,000 people so far and have seen an average recently of nearly 1,500 people a day enroll. Kentucky, which has been used as a model for how a ‘red’ state can make the law work if it just follows the guidelines for making signing up as efficient as possible, has already seen nearly 100,000 people sign up and has also seen huge surges in the past week in the number of people who have enrolled.

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However, with the deadline fast approaching in a few days to sign up for a plan that takes effect at the beginning of 2014, the state that has seen an unbelievable amount of new enrollments is none other than California. Obviously, with its huge population, we should expect the Golden State to make up a huge percentage of the number of people who sign up for health care under the ACA.  Yet, even with that expectation, the fact that in the past week 15,000 people a day enrolled is amazing. For the month of November, 80,000 Californians signed up for health care. That number was obliterated in just the past week.

If the numbers stay at this pace, by the end of December, California will have enrolled at least a quarter of a million people in the month alone. Overall, it is possible that we will have seen California, and only California, get close to half a million people get signed up for health coverage by the start of the new year. That on its own is an amazing achievement. California continues to be a truly progressive model for this nation.

We won’t see the total numbers for the entire nation until sometime in January when the Department of Health and Human Services releases them. And, there will obviously be many on the right that will still find something wrong with the numbers no matter how good they may look. But, let’s be real. The numbers are going to look pretty good for 2013 alone. And, by the time enrollment closes on March 31st (the deadline to not be penalized under the individual mandate), there will be millions and millions of people who are enrolled in either their own private insurance plan or will be covered under Medicaid. No amount of Republican whining and tantrum-throwing is going to change that.

Justin Baragona

Justin Baragona is the Managing Editor at Politicus Sports as well as Senior Editor at PoliticusUSA. He was a political writer for 411Mania.com before joining PoliticusUSA. Politically, Justin considers himself a liberal but also a realist and pragmatist. Currently, Justin lives in St. Louis, MO and is married. Besides writing, he also runs his own business after spending a number of years in the corporate world. You can follow Justin on Twitter either with his personal handle (@justinbaragona) or the Sports site’s (@PoliticusSports).