Remember the triumphant tone that the Obama administration took about the number of people who signed up for insurance plans on the Obamacare exchanges? Eight million people had signed up, Democrats crowed, even though it turns out about three-fourths of those people were already insured.

Sure, people lost access to life-saving medications because they couldn’t keep the insurance they had and liked. True, Obamacare is making rates rise sharply for many people, and it’s going to make coverage unaffordable for far more people soon, but at least eight million people signed up.

Except that number’s now falling. Large insurers offering coverage on Obamacare exchanges are seeing their enrollment numbers shrink as people who signed up are backing out by not paying their premiums, Investors Business Daily reports:

Aetna, the nation's third-largest health insurer, “had 720,000 people sign up for exchange coverage as of May 20, a spokesman confirmed to IBD. At the end of June, it had fewer than 600,000 paying customers. Aetna expects that to fall to ‘just over 500,000’ by the end of the year.

“That would leave Aetna's paid enrollment down as much as 30% from that May sign-up tally.”

It’s not just Aetna, the paper reports:

“Other major insurers danced around questions about attrition on recent earnings conference calls, but none denied that it was occurring.”

Why the drop-off?

“The gap between the high watermark of sign-ups and the number of current premium-paying customers reflects both those who never sent in a first payment and those who stopped paying for any number of reasons. For some, finances may have been too stretched. Some may have gotten fed up with high deductibles, and others could have switched plans so they wouldn't have to switch doctors. Still others may have found a job that came with health benefits, or others lost income and qualified for Medicaid.”

Which is good news if it is the case that people were able to earn better benefits at work. It’s terrible news if they found themselves dependent on the charity of taxpayers, which is what Medicaid is. Others are just making do as best they can amid the disruption caused by the president’s well-intentioned but failing scheme.

Not to say that things were just fine before Obamacare, but messing with everyone’s health care for the sake of adding coverage for a small sliver of the population, rather than using good reform ideas that already were being offered, seems like an ever worse idea, now that the number of supposed Obamacare beneficiaries continues to shrink.