#Obamacare good news: Will it carry over?

Compared to target numbers, the White House announcement that 8 million have enrolled for Obamacare is good news, straight-up; the word that 28 percent of these are 18-34 is an alloyed decent bit of news. It's definitely lower than hoped-for percentages, but in terms of absolute raw numbers, it's the same as one-third of 7 million.

Now, let's see what this means in the future, since, as I have blogged repeatedly in the past (click the Obamacare tag below rather than me posting a bunch of links) what these people signed up for is half-Obamacare, due to how much of what was in the actual Affordable Care Act still delayed, some of it for a full year or more, yet.

As for claims that Obamacare, or even half-Obamacare, is responsible for slower growth in health care costs?

Tosh, in a word.

The lingering effects of the Great Recession are, in all likelihood, the single biggest driver of that.

And, as I've also repeatedly blogged before, Obamacare, even the full Monty, has little in the way of built-in cost controls, starting with the fact that it didn't establish a federal department of insurance regulation. We actually won't have that good of an idea of what Obamacare is doing to control health care costs, IMO, until the end of this decade. And, given the current national political climate, there will be no chance of doing any real fixes until that time.

So, this is nice. Or maybe it's just "nice."

Per the half-Obamacare comment, it probably deserves only half a victory lap.

And, please, don't you Obots tell me about "all the Republican opposition." Dear Leader had at least as long to "adapt" on that as Kathleen Sibelius, now absurdly being touted by some Obot types as a Kansas candidate for the U.S. Senate, had to mic-check the Obamacare software.