The Obama administration has been crowing about how many people signed up for coverage on the Obamacare exchanges, but the real question is how many of those people were uninsured before. The reason the nation was saddled with a $2 trillion program that’s causing millions of people to lose their health plans or doctors and is raising premiums is because at least it will provide coverage to those who didn’t have it, according to Obamacare backers.

A new study by the nonprofit RAND Corporation Tuesday put the number of people who found coverage on the exchanges at 3.9 million, a number that does not include any surge in enrollments in the last three days of March. But the shock comes from another figure in RAND’s study:

“Although a total of 3.9 million people enrolled in marketplace plans, only 1.4 million of these individuals were previously uninsured.”

That's it: 1.4 million people gained coverage. As the Weekly Standard puts it:

“If the 1.4 million figure is correct, that means that less than 0.5 percent of the U.S. population gained insurance through the Obamacare exchanges.”

And millions of Americans should have lost their doctors and their health care plans for this?

More on the numbers from Forbes magazine's Avik Roy here.