The news stories are pretty much all the same. Heartless Republicans slashed Medicaid spending and let temporary “enhanced” Obamacare subsidies expire, and now millions are losing health insurance.

But buried deep within those stories, if it’s there at all, is the fact that when measured properly, enrollment for both programs is up.

Here’s a prime example.

Axios this week ran a story with the headline “Health program cuts hit home, fueling blame game.”

It begins by saying that “Sweeping changes that congressional Republicans made to the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid are starting to take effect, fueling an election-year blame game over coverage losses” and that enrollment in Obamacare is down 1.2 million from last year.

It goes on to say that 20,000 people could lose Medicaid coverage in Nebraska alone thanks to the new work requirements included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

It’s only buried at the bottom of that story that Axios admits the truth:

Obamacare “enrollment will likely still be well above the numbers from before the enhanced subsidies were first passed in 2021, when there were around 12 million enrollees,” it grudgingly admits.

(Why isn’t that the headline?)

Even then, Axios leaves out the fact that those “enhanced subsidies,” passed by Democrats and signed by Joe Biden, were meant to be a temporary salve in the wake of COVID. Enrollment was always supposed to come back down.

The same is true with Medicaid. During COVID, states were banned from cleaning their enrollment rolls. The result was that enrollment exploded. Once that ban was lifted, states started cleaning up their rolls, and the numbers started to decline.

And while today’s news reports blare claims that millions will lose coverage, the truth is that the number of enrollees today is still higher than it was in 2020, before the massive COVID expansion.

Even though new Medicaid work requirements will thin enrollment somewhat going forward, in a decade it’s still forecast to be 73 million, which is higher than any time in the program’s history before 2016.

What’s more, the current enrollment forecast is in line with projections made before COVID, according to data from the Congressional Budget Office.

Of course, the lie at the center of all these stories is that the bigger the enrollment in Medicaid and Obamacare, the better. The truth is that the ideal enrollment in these programs is zero. Because that would mean nobody is dependent on government to cover the cost of health insurance.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board