The Success is a Fluke?

The Obama administration is crowing over signing up over 7 million people for health insurance coverage through Obamacare portals. Given Republican challenges that set this number as a marker of failure, this is a tactical victory even if we find that up to 20% haven't--and may never--made a payment on their plan. But consider the objective.

Remember, we were told more than four years ago that 40 million people either couldn't buy insurance because of pre-existing conditions or that they couldn't afford to buy insurance that they wanted.

And Obamacare was sold as denying insurance companies the ability to turn down those with pre-existing conditions and making insurance more affordable.

We'll gloss over the fact that the law made signing up for insurance supposedly denied to them mandatory under threat of sicking the IRS on you.

So why is even 7 million after four years of preparing and a six-month sign-up window a real victory? Especially when some amount of those enrolled were detoured into Medicaid? Which is something they qualified for without Obamacare.

I know, some amount of people will have signed up for Obamacare approved policies outside of the website, but why isn't the number of people now uninsured approaching zero? Is this law and the results we see really worth the cost? Is it really solving the problem?

I mean, good grief, is this law ultimately being considered a success because Sandra Fluke now qualifies for free birth control?

UPDATE: Ah, let me clarify that those sent to Medicaid are counted separately, as I just read, so those people won't subtract from the victory count.

UPDATE: More of substance here and here. On the latter, I'm kind of amazed that researchers had to rely on surveys rather than actual government data. WTF?