The truth is, nobody has a good, real-time fix on how successful the Affordable Care Act has been in reducing the ranks of the uninsured. The Obama administration hasn’t been able to say how many of the 3.3 million people who have signed up for private health insurance coverage, or of the 6.3 million who have been determined eligible for Medicaid, were actually uninsured before — and health care experts aren’t sure yet, either.

There have been a couple of surveys, and at least one state — New York — has been keeping track of how many people were uninsured when they applied for coverage. But their answers are so wildly different that all we can say is, it’s either a tiny minority that were uninsured, or it’s most of them.

Want to narrow that down? You’ll just have to wait. We might have some better hints in April — but it could be next year before there are national numbers that everyone will accept.

The search for real, trustworthy numbers shows just how hard it is to track how many uninsured people are gaining health coverage in anything close to real time, and even harder to link those changes directly to the ACA.