We’re now a month in to the launch of Healthcare.gov, and the problems – both technical and political – only seem to be mounting for the federal health insurance marketplace.

In particular, the Obama administration has faced backlash for repeatedly stating that those who like their current individual health insurance plans will be able to keep them when that’s proven not to be the case. But is that necessarily a bad thing?

ProPublica’s Charlie Ornstein and Steve Engelberg return to the Storage Closet Studio to discuss the real-life winners and losers of Obamacare, what consumers can expect starting in 2014, and how this change will help redistribute the risk in individual health coverage:

“…if you put the burden on people who are sick to pay the full cost of their coverage, the system collapses under its own weight,” Ornstein says. “We don’t ask elderly people to pay the full cost of Medicare. We as a society help underwrite that. We don’t ask poor people who are disabled to pay the full cost of their health insurance. That’s why we have Medicaid. And so the idea is that up until this point the individual insurance market has been sort of crippled by insurers being able to deny people based on pre-existing conditions, insurers being able to really set benefits that once you’re in it, and if you do get sick, you realize it doesn’t provide you with much of anything.”

You can listen to this podcast – as well as our previous episode, “Why Is Healthcare.gov So Flawed?” – on iTunes and Stitcher. And for more of Ornstein’s reporting on the Affordable Care Act, read his latest posts:

• Why Healthcare.gov Broke: Two Competing Story Lines
• A Month in to Healthcare.gov, Real-Life Winners and Losers
• Health Policy Canceled? What We Know and Don’t Know