The Obamacare cancellation stories have dominated the media for the past two weeks. And it’s easy to understand why. People losing their insurance is a bigger story than people getting insurance for the first time—particularly when the folks losing coverage remember, quite distinctly, the president vowing they can keep their insurance if they like it.

At least some of these tales are precisely what they seem to be—stories of people paying more for less coverage, or facing increases that put real strains on their budgets, or moving to plans that don’t provide access to the same doctors and hospitals. You've read some of their tales in this space. These people are angry and feel deceived. That’s a totally legitimate story.

But how big a story should it be? To answer that, you need to know how many people actually fit these descriptions—and what might have happened to these people if the Affordable Care Act had never become law. It's impossible to answer either question with certainty, because reliable statistics aren’t available and there's no time machine for seeing how alternative futures might play out. But there are at least six reasons to think the real story is smaller—and way more complicated—than a credulous media would have everybody believe.

1. People with these policies frequently don’t like them.

The best estimates suggest that about 12 to 15 million people buy insurance on their own. In other words, they are part of the “non-group” market. So far, according to several media reports, about 5 million of these people have received cancellation notices. The final number will likely be higher. But it’s not as if most people with these policies feel particularly attached to them.

The best survey on this subject I’ve seen comes from the Center for Health Research and Transformation. In it, nearly half of all people surveyed rated their non-group coverage “fair or poor.” The proportion of respondents who had the same thing to say about employer coverage, Medicare, or Medicaid was half as high. This isn't particularly surprising, given that the most egregious insurance company abuses—rescinding policies for people who get sick, failing to pay for services that beneficiaries assumed were covered—usually come from the non-group market.