An Update on the 858,000 Conservative Viral Infection

The RAND study discussed in the previous post has now been made public.

It reports, contrary to the countless conservative web sites that claimed only 858,000 out of 7.1 million of ObamaCare exchange enrollees were previously uninsured, the actual figure is, (predictably) much, much higher. RAND estimates that as of mid-March, when there were 3.9 million exchange enrollees, 1.4 million of them were previously uninsured. When you extrapolate these numbers through of the end of March--a period in which the number of exchange enrollees exploded to 7.1 million--you get 2.5 million exchange enrollees who were previously uninsured. The represents a 36% slice of the exchange pool who are newly insured, which is 3 times the rate claimed by bogus conservative reporting of the RAND study prior to publication.

Furthermore, when you include the other areas of ObamaCare, primarily the expansion of Medicaid, the total number of newly insured from Sept. 2013-mid-March, 2014 is 9.3 million, a drop in the percent of uninsured in the country from 20.5% to 15.8%.

This is one of the clearest examples of how the conservative media can disseminate false information through a viral connection of media outlets.