Kentucky's Uninsured Cut 40%. Conservative Columnist Advises Concession

Obamacare cuts Kentucky's uninsured rate by 40 percent. Sahil Kapur in Talking Points Memo.

CHAIT: The Obamacare train did not wreck. "One immediate conclusion is that the Republican war to strangle Obamacare in the crib has come to pieces. The plan assumed, correctly, that the new law would be most vulnerable in its nascent stage. Republicans hoped that a combination of legislative attacks, on-the-ground activism, and coordinated messaging could deprive the new insurance exchanges of the customers they needed to form a critical mass, either as a political constituency or as an actuarially stable mix of customers. They failed. Obamacare's non-trainwreck also reveals something broader and deeper about American politics. The Obamacare wars pit two opposing camps who not only have different ideas about the role of government, but different kinds of ideas about the role of government." Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine.

PONNURU: Obamacare's naysayers should concede defeat. "Hitting that goal was important as a political matter, and as a sign -- but not a guarantee -- that the exchanges would be actuarially stable. We don't know yet how many of them will be: We'd need to know the mix of healthy and sick enrollees in each state to make that judgment. We also don't know for sure how many of the enrollees were previously uninsured. And we want to know how well the law has done in achieving its larger goal of increasing coverage, not just of making itself sustainable. But it's clear now that one scenario with a lot of purchase among conservative opponents of Obamacare -- that the law would "implode," "collapse" or "unravel" -- is highly unlikely." Ramesh Ponnuru in Bloomberg View.

PHILIP KLEIN: 7 million figure presents challenge for Republicans. "When Obama made his now-infamous promise that if people liked their health care plans they could keep them, he did so because he understood that any significant changes to the health care system would cause disruptions, so he needed to reassure Americans that their plans wouldn't be affected by what he was proposing. It was a clear lie, but one that was rooted in an understanding of political realities. If Republicans had taken over the White House last year and pursued the repeal of Obamacare, they could have done so at a time when the law's beneficiaries were mostly theoretical. Now, however, Republicans will be facing the same problem Obama did. Only more so, because they've invested so much in the idea that nobody can lose coverage as a result of health care legislative changes. Even if the law remains broadly unpopular, Republicans will have have to deal with the fact that millions of Americans would have their coverage disrupted by repeal. And everybody knows how well it worked out for Obama when, at the height of last fall's backlash against plan cancellations, he tried to downplay the millions of people being affected as only a small percentage of the population." Philip Klein in the Washington Examiner.