From April from FactCheck:
"It’s true that insurance companies discontinued health plans that had covered millions of people who had bought them directly rather than through an employer. That’s because those plans didn’t meet the coverage standards of the new law.
But those policyholders didn’t lose the ability to have insurance. In most cases, insurers offered them an alternative plan, though there were some instances of companies exiting the individual market altogether."
"Critics of the law now say millions lost their health insurance. But that’s misleading. Those individual market plans were discontinued, but policyholders weren’t denied coverage. And the question is, how many millions of insured Americans had plans canceled, and how does that compare with the millions of uninsured Americans who gained coverage under the law.
There is evidence that far more have gained coverage than had their policies canceled."
"The authors, as noted, picked an estimate that fell in the middle of this range to arrive at their figure of 2.6 million discontinued policies. Until and unless better evidence comes along, that’s the most solidly based figure available."
" The RAND numbers are extrapolated from a survey, and one with sizable margins of error. The estimate of 9.3 million newly insured has a margin of error of 3.5 million people, meaning researchers have a high degree of confidence that the true number would be between 5.8 million and 12.8 million. And the estimate of 700,000 uninsured who previously had individual market plans carries a margin of error of 900,000, putting the likely real number somewhere between zero and 1.6 million people.
Millions more are expected to gain insurance because of the law nationwide in the coming years. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that there will be 25 million fewer uninsured due to the ACA as early as 2016."
http://www.factcheck.org/2014/04/millions-lost-insurance/
