A week ago pundits on the left were crowing about the news released by Peter Lee, director of the Obamacare exchange in California, that the effect of Obamacare on individual health insurance rates in the state would be far better than previously indicated. In fact, the rates would not go up, and would even go down.

Well, not exactly. According to Forbes contributor Avik Roy, Lee was comparing two different things:

“The rates submitted to Covered California for the 2014 individual market,” the state said in a press release, “ranged from two percent above to 29 percent below the 2013 average premium for small employer plans in California’s most populous regions.”

That’s the sentence that led to all of the triumphant commentary from the left. “This is a home run for consumers in every region of California,” exulted Peter Lee.

Except that Lee was making a misleading comparison. He was comparing apples””the plans that Californians buy today for themselves in a robust individual market””and oranges””the highly regulated plans that small employers purchase for their workers as a group. The difference is critical.

Anyone who knows anything about health care insurance—and I mean the most basic things about health care insurance—knows that small groups are ordinarily less expensive than individual, sometimes by a great deal. It depends, of course, on the state (and traditionally it also depended on the individual, because in many states individual policies could be underwritten, pre-Obamacare), but that’s the general trend.

Roy does some of the math and concludes that in California, 25-year-old and 40-year old male nonsmokers would see their premiums more than double under Obamacare. That makes intuitive sense, because that’s a young population that tends to be fairly healthy and would therefore have usually had lowish premiums in a traditional insurance market.

In his article, Roy doesn’t give similar statistics in the individual market for a male smoker of say, sixty. My guess is that such a person’s premiums might go down somewhat under Obamacare, if only because they would have been so high before. But it depends on so many things, too—including how highly regulated the individual market in California already is, for example.

My basic point, however, is that I tend to ignore most prognostications (pro or con) that purport to project exact figures for before and after Obamacare, because insurance is already so complex that it really depends on the state, the company, the characteristics of the insured person, the class of insurance, and the level of insurance. Not to mention the fact that the situation will probably change as time goes on and Obamacare morphs into something else (single payer?), which many people think was always part of the plan for its boosters.

What I do know is that Obamacare will reduce choice, and that matters to most people. For example, Roy’s article points out that under Obamacare only people under 30 will be allowed to buy catastrophic insurance. That’s quite a limitation, and it’s only one of many. And I also know that Obamacare will increase exponentially the involvement of the government (and the IRS!) in the delicate and should-be-private matter of health care. Not something most people would consider a plus, to say the least, especially after the news of the last few weeks.

Nancy Pelosi was right about one thing: we had to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. And the revelations have only just begun.