[Happy Monkey]

The numbers are the numbers of people enrolling in healthcare through the exchanges, (but not moving onto Medicare). The expectation before launch was to have 7 million by now. When the launch was so bad, they revised the expectation down to 6 million.

(As an aside, there were more procrastinators than expected, and the number may reach 7 million after all, but that information came in after this chart was produced.)

The Y-axis issue is putting up a bar graph with an unlabeled vertical axis, and making the difference in size between the bars an arbitrary amount. Someone looking at the graph will get the impression that the axis starts at zero, and (in the example above) the actual enrollees are about a third of the goal, since the one bar is about a third of the size of the other. If you look at the numbers, and do some calculation, you can figure out the actual relationship between the numbers, but you could have done that without the graph. A graph is supposed to communicate an idea visually, and provide the data as reference, not communicate an incorrect impression that can be corrected by interpreting the numbers yourself.