Are Uninsured Estimates Overblown?

This morning, the Barack Obama administration released data on enrollments in the health-care exchanges. If you've been paying any attention at all, the numbers aren't a huge surprise. In the first two months of operation, 365,000 people got as far as selecting plans on the exchanges. A little more than 60 percent -- 227,000 of them -- enrolled through state-run exchanges, with the overwhelming majority of enrollments coming in four states: New York, California, Kentucky and Washington. The rest were on the federal marketplace. About three times that number have been "deemed eligible" for Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program.

How good you think this is depends on what baseline you use. The administration is comparing it with the first week of October, when basically no one could enroll; obviously, this represents a huge improvement over that. But compared with projections made before the exchanges opened, this is quite low -- about a quarter of what officials were expecting. Unless it accelerates dramatically, the system is going to be well below the 7 million private-insurance enrollments that the Congressional Budget Office forecast for the first year of operation.