I had the privilege to co-author a Forbes blog post with Chris Conover, Forbes Contributor and Research Scholar at the Center for Health Policy and Inequalities Research at Duke University.

You can read the excerpt below or the entire entry here.

The race for people to #GetCovered through Obamacare’s state and federal health insurance exchanges has officially crossed the wire.  In its sixth and final enrollment report released late last week, the Department of Health and Human Services disclosed that a total of 8 million individuals have signed up for an Obamacare compliant plan within the individual health insurance market.

When it comes to measuring the enrollment race’s all around performance, perhaps we can compare it to this past weekend’s Kentucky Derby.  The Derby brought out the best and worst from its participants, yet it is just the first race of the grueling Triple Crown.  Obamacare likewise has more enrollment races to endure in the future.  And measures of performance will vary based on short-term and long-term projections.

As we’ll see Republican-controlled states won the short-term race yet Democrat-controlled states have an edge in the longer race. Here’s how we reach that conclusion and what it means.