ROBERT SAMUELSON: Obama’s Broken Promise, Chapter Two:

President Obama’s broken promise about people being able to keep their existing health insurance is much larger than we’ve been led to believe. Until now, attention has focused on the individual insurance market: people buying coverage for themselves and their families from insurance companies. Policies have been canceled because they don’t comply with the Affordable Care Act (ACA). But the individual market is small, representing about 5 percent of the non-elderly population, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. What’s unappreciated is that cancellations, under today’s law, will ultimately spread to the largest insurance market: employer-provided coverage.

So Chapter Two of the broken promise looms. In 2012, 171 million Americans received health insurance from their employers, reports the Census Bureau. This dwarfs Medicaid (51 million) and Medicare (49 million), the next largest sources. Given the ACA’s complexity, it’s hard to know how many Americans with employer coverage might be hit by policy cancellations. But plausible assumptions suggest between 25 million and 50 million, mostly at small firms.

But people will still be able to afford these.