But wait! With House Republican committee reports, you always have to read the details. And in this case the details say quite a lot. The committee staff got their information directly from insurers, but it’s only valid up through April 15. As experts quickly pointed out, that’s too early to get an accurate sense of the payup rate.

Remember, open enrollment officially ended on March 31. And, thanks to the Administration’s extensions, people were still signing up well into April. At the time the Committee requested the information, many of these people would have just received their first invoices for payment. Payment wouldn’t have been due until the end of the month—in other words, Wednesday. Some wouldn't owe first payments until the first of June, because that's when their insurance starts.

In other words, it’s safe to assume that the real payup rate is higher than 67 percent. How much higher? There’s no way to be sure. But there are plenty of encouraging signs. On Tuesday, at a breakfast sponsored by Politico Pro, the head of the insurance industry’s main trade group—Karen Ignani, of America’s Health Insurance Plans—said that about 85 percent of people who bought coverage through the marketplaces were paying premiums.

On the very same day, officials from Wellpoint told investors on a conference call that the payup figure was 90 percent, according to reports from the Washington Post’s Jason Millman and the National Journal's Clara Ritger. Those figures are consistent with what industry and government officials had said previously—most recently, earlier in April, when California officials said the payup rate in their marketplace was about 85 percent. (The House Republican report doesn't include data from state-based marketplaces, possibly skewing the numbers more.) That would put the actual number of people getting insurance somewhere around 7 million, give or take a few hundred thousand—which is what the Congressional Budget Office originally projected and actually a bit higher what the CBO projected a few months ago, after Obamacare's initial troubles.

One more reason to be skeptical about the report is its heft—or lack thereof. It is just one online page, with a link to a one-page table. It doesn't include the actual filings from insurers—perhaps because those filings, which the Committee's Democratic staff subsequently publicized, warned explicitly that the April 15 data was incomplete. "Data being provided in this submission ... does not represent final verified numbers," Humana officials said.