Indeed, a larger number of people — perhaps five million in the nation’s individual insurance market — are now facing cancellation of their coverage and far higher premiums and deductibles in the new policies they must purchase. And yet the administration has dismissed them as a tiny part of the U.S. population. “It’s a relatively small number of people in the overall scheme of things,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said last month.

What is indisputable is that the aspects of Obamacare the White House cites most often in its promotional campaign — the pre-existing conditions policy, or the estimated 3.4 million young Americans who can stay on their parents’ coverage until age 26 — involve numbers that are far smaller than the tens of millions of people who will likely face steeper costs, nearly unpayable deductibles and sharply limited doctor choices under Obamacare. (In addition to the 10-million person individual market, some experts believe such problems are coming soon to the 45-million person small-group market.)