Researchers: PPACA helped more than 7.3 million adults get covered

Sommers and his colleagues used private survey data to come up with those figures. They did not look at the effects of PPACA on the likelihood that children would have coverage, and they did not distinguish between people who became insured through Medicaid and other government programs and those who obtained commercial health coverage, either through a PPACA public exchange or outside the exchange system.

See also: Gallup: Private insurance may have expanded, too

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the net cost of the PPACA exchange program, PPACA Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) expansion, and PPACA small employer tax credits will be $36 billion this year. The Sommers figures suggest that the government may be spending an average about $2,000 to $5,000 this year per newly insured adult as a result of PPACA. Adding the number of newly insured children calculations could reduce those averages substantially.

When Congress was designing PPACA, a number of researchers and think tanks tried to analyze health reform proposals in the terms of the cost per newly insured individual.

Stephen Parente, a University of Minnesota economist who was serving as an American Enterprise Institute adjunct scholar, estimated in October 2009 that a private-market-oriented program based on use of exchanges and letting carriers sell coverage across state lines would ultimately reduce the uninsurance rate among U.S. citizens by 46 percent, to 18 million people, at an average cost of about $3,500 per newly insured individual. He estimated a proposal developed by Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., would cost about $4,100 per newly insured individual.

Consultants at PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated in January 2009, before Barack Obama took over as president, that the package of health system changes he was proposing would cost about $2,500 per newly insured individual.