Obamacare off like a rocket in Oregon.

Carla Axtman

The Oregon Tea Party's collective head must have exploded when they saw this:

Nick Budnick, The Oregonian:

Oregon cuts tally of people lacking health insurance by 10 percent in two weeks

Though Oregon's health insurance exchange is not yet up and running, the number of uninsured is already dropping thanks to new fast-track enrollment for the Oregon Health Plan.

The low-income, Medicaid-funded program has already signed up 56,000 new people, cutting the state's number of uninsured by 10 percent, according to Oregon Health Authority officials.

Though the new exchange called Cover Oregon was originally intended to be used for Oregon Health Plan enrollment, the online marketplace doesn't work yet. Instead, new Oregon Health Plan members are being enrolled using a fast-track process that was approved by the federal government in August.

Since late September the Oregon Health Authority sent out notices to 260,000 people already enrolled in the state's food stamps program since late October.

The notices informed them that based on their income reported to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, they are pre-qualified for the Oregon Health Plan in 2014. Most of them are newly eligible thanks to the state's decision to expand the program's income caps under the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

The technical glitches with getting things up and running both at the federal level and the state level are being widely touted by the naysayers, but the proof is in the numbers. That's a lot of people now eligible to get health care that previously didn't have access.

Once this thing is up and actually running, I still suspect that a lot of people are going to be surprised at how much they like it relative to what we came from. A single payer system would obviously be vastly superior. But this is certainly better than where we were.

By Carla Axtman Oct. 18, 2013