How this web designer became the Nate Silver of healthcare reporting

Back in 2013, the Obama Administration rolled out a new version of Healthcare.gov, with disastrous results. It was the public unveiling of the Obamacare exchanges that would allow anyone to buy health insurance on the open market, and yet the website was almost impossible to navigate without encountering errors that would prevent you from signing up for insurance.

At the time, Charles Gaba was running a freelance web designer business in Michigan and writing for the liberal blog Daily Kos during his free time. Frustrated by the botched rollout and the amount of misinformation floating around about how many people had actually enrolled in the exchanges, he made a public call to other Daily Kos bloggers to help him count the number of Obamacare enrollees.

That project eventually evolved into ACAsignups.net, a standalone blog that eventually captured the attention of policymakers, journalists, and anyone interested in the state of U.S. healthcare. Traffic to his blog exploded, and he became an overnight celebrity in the healthcare space.

I interviewed Gaba about how he's monetizing his website and the role he's played in helping save Obamacare from GOP sabotage.