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Three years into the Affordable Care Act, there remain places where many people still lack health insurance. But their share keeps shrinking. (Margot Sanger-Katz and Quoctrung Bui, 10/31)

In all the knee-jerk hand-wringing over the announced rate increases for Affordable Care Act exchange insurance (sorry for the mixed metaphor, but it’s apt), one factor in the increases has been consistently overlooked. On average, states that have been hostile to Obamacare are facing the largest premium increases for 2017. Residents in states that have embraced the law will do much better. (Michael Hiltzik, 10/31)

Whatever the outcome of the election, at minimum, Obamacare requires major surgery. Insurers won't stick around to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Customers won't renew if prices soar even more. This is a crisis moment. Democrats and Republicans will either overhaul the law or watch millions of Americans lose coverage. Pols who fail will be betting — hoping — that voters blame ... the other party. That's shortsighted and dangerous. ... But our concern transcends the political repercussions. Remember all those hopeful millions of Americans who applauded Obamacare? They — and their children — still need excellent coverage at affordable prices. They don't need any more empty promises from Washington. (10/31)

[T]he gleeful gloating of people such as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, that this is the end of “Obamacare,” that it is a failure, is simply wrong. Most of the people who’ll see the premium increases won’t feel them much, because they get government subsidies to help them get their insurance. And is the ACA a failure for people whose lives may have been saved because they’ve had health insurance for the first time in their lives and can now afford to see a doctor regularly rather than rely on care in hospital emergency rooms? Is it a failure for those who have insurance even though they have medical problems that would have caused them to be denied at private companies? Is it a failure for those young people who were able, under the ACA, to stay on their parents’ policies until the age of 26? The ACA is not a failure, no matter how badly Republicans want it to fail. (10/31)

The recent announcement that insurance premiums will be going up for people who buy their health coverage through Obamacare has put the program back in the news, with Republicans from Donald Trump on down calling for its repeal and Democrats saying its problems can be easily fixed. But the issue that neither side ever wants to talk about is that the Affordable Care Act, whether it survives or not, will have little effect on the health of most Americans. (Daniel Weintraub, 10/31)

Some Kansans will face the sticker shock of big premium hikes, but their premium increases will be lower than those for some nearby states. And, thanks to Kansas Insurance Commissioner Ken Selzer, they will have choices that they otherwise would not have. Like every candidate in the five-way Republican primary race for insurance commissioner in 2014, Selzer made opposition to the ACA, commonly called “Obamacare,” part of his campaign. But once elected to work on behalf of Kansas insurance consumers within the confines of the federal system, Selzer put practicality ahead of politics by recruiting a new insurer, Medica, into the Kansas ACA marketplace for 2017. Selzer worked for months to get Medica and another insurer, Coventry Health and Life (a subsidiary of Aetna), to join the exchange. (Andy Marso, 10/31)