But the political conversation over Obamacare was driven almost entirely by people who had, and knew they would be able to keep, their health insurance. It was filled with a lot of assumptions, theories, and speculations about what people who didn't have good insurance, or any insurance, would do. And after Obamacare's disastrous launch, the theory took hold that these people wouldn't find this untested program worth the trouble. It was the permanently insured speculating about the uninsured and the barely insured – and, unsurprisingly, they got it wrong.

"It was hard to sign up for Obamacare. It's worse to be uninsured."

Back in December, when the web site's woes were fresh in everyone's mind, I made a prediction that sounded strange even to me: Obamacare might still hit its 7 million enrollees. The reason I made that prediction was I'd been talking to the uninsured who'd been spending hours or days or weeks trying to get through the web site. They were frustrated and they were angry. But not one of them had given up.

I asked pollsters Mike Perry and Tresa Undem, who specialized in surveying the uninsured, whether they had found anyone who'd been deterred by the unusable web site and overloaded call centers. Not even one person, they said. The persistence was amazing.