Is Obamacare making America great again?

Some days I really wonder what the heck CNN used to cover before they invented Donald Trump and the 2016 presidential race? For all we know. ISIS has taken over Saudi Arabia and parts of Argentina have slid into the sea....more at the bottom of the hour, after Trump has finished his rally in Fargo. Here's a story that almost dropped off our warped radar: Obamacare is doing at least one of the things it was supposed to do.

Big time:

WASHINGTON — More than 7 million previously uninsured Americans gained health coverage in 2015, the second full year of the Obamacare coverage expansion, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

During the fourth quarter of last year, just 9.1 percent of U.S. residents, or 28.6 million people, had no health coverage, the National Health Interview Survey found. That's a decline of 2.4 percentage points and 7.4 million people from a year before.

The additional 7.4 million insured builds on the 8.8 million previously uninsured people who got covered in 2014, the first year of the Affordable Care Act's full benefits.

Obamacare's health coverage programs remain works in progress, with 19 states continuing to refuse the law's Medicaid expansion for the poorest uninsured and financial difficulties facing some major insurance companies participating in the exchange marketplaces where low- and middle-income households buy subsidized private insurance.

But when it comes to covering the uninsured, the law has been a clear success.

Indeed. And here's the best part -- in January, President Trump is going to get rid of Obamacare and replace it with something that's really "terrific." OK, I'm being sarcastic there (did it come across?)

But in his own weird way, Donald Trump actually has a point, even if it's not the one he was trying to make. First of all, let's stipulate that what's been accomplished under the Affordable Care Act is truly remarkable -- arguably the greatest legislative achievement by a president since the domestic agenda of LBJ in the 1960s. The 16 million Americans who now have health coverage under Obamacare means that a large number of our fellow citizens will enjoy healthier and longer lives, without worrying that just one illness will plunge them into bankruptcy. The political hate that continues to be heaped on this accomplishment is truly despicable.

That said, in a perfect world we actually would replace Obamacare with something even better. By better, I mean a) a health insurance program that reaches the millions more who still aren't covered b) a program that's a lot better at curbing rising medical costs than the sometimes ironically named Affordable Care Act and c) would have better ability to fight cost increases of the kind predicted for the coming year.

Trump and other Republicans seem to have no serious plan beyond tossing millions back into the psychic terrorism of no coverage at all . Hillary Clinton's said varying things over the campaign but the general sense is that she'd keep the status quo with minor tinkering. The only bold plan -- and the only one that makes sense, for what that matters nowadays -- is Bernie Sanders's Medicare-for-all.

When I say it makes sense, I mean the ideal of universal and uniform coverage -- in which every American citizen could walk into an ER and know that he or she is covered -- makes the most sense, especially since that tracks how most civilized nations already handle health care. But politically, it's a non-starter.

In a perfect world, Congress would simply be able to pass a new law that could fix whatever flaws exist in the now-six-year-old ACA, to make health care more affordable and even more available. That is not possible in America as we have chosen to construct it. Unlike America, the question for Obamacare isn't whether we can make it great again, since for 16 million citizens it already is. The question is when will we ever have the gumption to make it even greater.