Obamacare covered somebody's health, but not mine

Remember in the fall, when Obamacare's insurance exchanges got off to a shamefully bad start, and people who never liked the health-care law in the first place started cheering its impending doom?

Yeah, they were wrong. Millions of people have bought insurance on the exchanges, most of whom were uninsured before. Most are eligible for significant subsidies (pdf). Their rates won't necessarily go up a lot next year. Meanwhile, millions of low-income Americans have been added to Medicaid.

Now, none of this directly affects most of us who get our health insurance through our employers. Obamacare does a lot of little things, but its major provisions don't really change group coverage. (That's by design; Congress could never have passed reform that significantly shook up white-collar people's coverage.) Add Obamacare's singularly polarizing politics, and it's not that surprising that a lot of Americans don't think Obamacare has done anything to help their families (pdf), as CNN found in a poll this week.