It's Okay to Feel Good About Obamacare Again

Open enrollment for the Affordable Care Act ended officially on Monday night. And the last-minute rush to sign up for new insurance plans was every bit as big as the experts had always predicted. Traffic to the online marketplaces and calls to the telephone help centers were the highest ever. At in-person counseling offices around the country, people lined up by the dozens. All of this happened even though the Administration had already announced a special grace period for people who couldn’t complete their applications in time—in effect, extending the enrollment deadline for an extra week or two. “This dwarfs anything we’ve seen before,” one senior administration official told me. The official numbers will soon reflect that.  Last week, the Administration announced that 6 million people had signed up for coverage. By the time open enrollment is truly over, the number almost surely will be higher than 7 million—as the latest projection from Charles Gaba indicates.