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“Burying The Lede”: Obamacare Denialism Is More Futile Than Ever

So it turns out that millions of people dealt with the Affordable Care Act enrollment cutoff pretty much the way they habitually deal with the April 15 income tax filing deadline: procrastinating until the last minute to insure maximum stress and standing in line. Like mobbing shopping malls on the day after Thanksgiving, it’s the American way of life.

One result was predictably negative headlines like this classic in The Washington Post: “HealthCare.gov tumbles on deadline day as consumers race to sign up for insurance.” Because as we all know, temporary computer glitches—which never happen in the flawlessly efficient corporate sector, of course—are the big story here.

In the news business, this is called “burying the lede.” It’s the equivalent of a sports story headlined “Third inning errors mar Red Sox World Series win.” Because the real news, sports fans, is that Obamacare has met and even surpassed every enrollment projection. Oddly, millions of last-minute shoppers decided they’d be better off with health insurance after all.

Who could have guessed?

At this writing, it appears that the late buying surge will carry Obamacare beyond the 7 million enrollments projected by the Congressional Budget Office. Too bad, because that quite ruins the visual effect of a comically misleading Fox News bar graph that contrived to make the 6 million citizens enrolled as of last week appear to be a small fraction of the 7 million CBO projection, rather than 84 percent of it. An alert basset hound wouldn’t have been fooled. Do they think viewers are morons?

But more about what Ed Kilgore calls “Obamacare denialism” to come. According to a Rand Corporation study reported in the Los Angeles Times, along with the 7 million newly enrolled in private insurance plans, roughly 4.5 million previously uninsured Americans have enrolled in Medicaid since the new law came online last November. Another 3 million young adults gained coverage through their parents’ insurance plans, as Obamacare allows.

Rand estimates that another 9 million Americans have bought directly from insurance companies, although many of those were previously insured. Overall, the uninsured rate has dropped from an estimated 20.9 percent to 16.6 percent in the law’s first year—hardly the sudden revolution in American health care some dreamed of, but a creditable start.

What’s more, the numbers are dramatically better in states that worked to implement rather than obstruct the Affordable Care Act. New York State told CNBC that 59 percent of those buying health insurance through the state’s marketplace had been previously uninsured. In Kentucky, it’s 75 percent—immeasurably improving the lives of rural Kentuckians particularly.

How long will their neighbors, in, say, Tennessee be able to hold out against Obamacare as word gets around?

So how are Republicans whose congressmen have voted over 50 times to repeal the law handling the unwelcome good news? About the way they dealt with allegedly “skewed” poll numbers back in 2012. Who can forget the Weekly Standard’s bold election eve prediction? “New Projection of Election Results: Romney 52, Obama 47.” According to pundit Fred Barnes, a 10-point Romney landslide was entirely likely.

The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn summarizes: “[Republicans] are doing what they almost always do when data confounds their previously held beliefs. They are challenging the statistics—primarily, by suggesting that most of the people getting insurance already had coverage. Some, like Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, say the administration is ‘cooking the books.’ Others, like Senator Ted Cruz, say that the number of people without insurance is actually rising.”

We await Senator Cruz’s thunderous proof.

Meanwhile, something else that’s been happening right in the face of all those Koch-financed “Americans for Prosperity” ads lamenting that the Affordable Care Act “just doesn’t work,” is that the law’s popularity among the public has been steadily rising. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll released this week shows Obamacare supported by more Americans than oppose it, albeit by a scant margin of 49 to 48 percent.

Interestingly, 36 percent of self-described conservatives now support the law, as opposed to 17 percent last November. How that will play into November 2014 congressional elections remains to be seen. However, it’s already become clear to the saner sort of conservative thinker that the Affordable Care Act is here to stay.

The market has spoken. The political rebellion and/or actuarial collapse dreamed of on the right clearly isn’t going to happen. “[W]herever they go and whatever they do, writes Ross Douthat in the New York Times, conservatives “will have to deal with the reality that Obamacare, thrice-buried, looks very much alive.”

Longer term, Obamacare denialism appears even more futile. The ever-prescient Kevin Drum points out that Republicans can’t dream of repealing the law as long as its namesake lives in the White House. And by 2017 the CBO estimates the law’s benefits will extend to 36 million Americans—a formidable constituency indeed.

 

By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, April 2, 2014

April 2, 2014 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, Republicans | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Obamacare Crosses The Finish Line”: The People Who Are In Charge Of Our “Perception” Will Catch Up With Reality Someday

Brace yourself, friends, for the new hate-and-snicker-fest on the right about the Obamacare numbers. It started over the weekend—actually, it’s been more or less ongoing since last fall—but it’s going to crescendo now that the enrollment deadline has been reached. Six million, eh? Bah. A million below expectations, they’ll say, and in any case a fake number. That’s what Wyoming Senator John Barrasso said Sunday on Fox; the administration is “cooking the books.” He didn’t reveal how he knows this, but of course he wasn’t pressed on the point.

As of Sunday morning while Barrasso was speaking, the enrollment figure was edging close to 6.6 million, and by midnight tonight it might well hit 7 million. Conservatives will say it’s all a big con. Two criticisms have some merit. First, it’s certainly true that signing up isn’t the same thing as paying premiums on a month-to-basis. So we’ll have to see about that over time. Second, the percent of enrollees who are young and healthy is apparently a little lower than the most optimistic hopes (it’s around 27 percent).

Those are open questions that can’t be answered for a while. But they provide no basis on which to doubt the raw numbers. There was a similar late rush on Romneycare, when nearly 7,800 Bay Staters signed up in the last month before the deadline, around twice as many as during a typical earlier month. And they certainly don’t demonstrate fraudulence. Unless the photographers who snapped these photos that appear on the White House blog are working under the same orders from Pyongyang as the people who allegedly concocted Barack Obama’s birth certificate, there’s nothing fraudulent going on here, either: What you see here, instead, are long lines of people waiting to enroll at sign-up centers in cities across the country.

It’s still going to be a huge challenge to shift public opinion. Or is it? Maybe it’s shifting already. Consider these numbers from a Kaiser Foundation poll from last week. Percent who like the ACA’s extension of dependent coverage: 76. Percent supportive of the act’s closing of the Medicare drug “donut hole”: 73. Percent favoring “guaranteed issue” of coverage to people who are already sick: 69. Percent who back the Medicaid expansion: 62.

Oh, wait. Those are the Republican percentages. The overall percentages, respectively, are 80, 79, 70, and 74.

It’s the same old disconnect. Just as majorities of even rank-and-file Republicans support things like restricting the gun-show loophole (indeed a majority of NRA members support that), majorities of Republicans back these and other basic common-sense provisions of the ACA. And yet these same Republicans keep reelecting to Congress a horde of dishonest and ideologically driven harlots who’ve voted 50-whatever times to do away with all these positive changes.

And the mainstream media continue to insist that because of one congressional race in Florida in a district Republicans have held since Nixon was president, that this law is going to be the Democrats’ downfall this November. And why is that? Well, because they’ve decided. Obama and the Democrats are forcing this whole thing down people’s throats, and the Republicans’ repeal position represents the will of the besieged people.

Is that so? Here are two other numbers from the Kaiser poll. They gave people four options: keep the law as is, keep it and change it where needed, get rid of it and replace with a GOP alternative, and simply get rid of it and replace it with nothing. The first two and the second two can be reasonably grouped together as “basically support the law” and “basically oppose the law.” The numbers are 59 to 29. Not against—in support of the law.

My main point here is not to argue that Obamacare will be a plus for Democrats this fall. I think, as I’ve often written, that it can be—or that it at least can be a draw if Democrats pound away on the specifics and challenge Republicans to defend a world in which sick people can again be denied coverage and all the rest. That would be a nice little layer of icing, because it would prove the smug conventional wisdom as wrong as it usually is.

But the cake has to do with the way this entire conversation has been framed in the media. Imagine that the Democrats were standing implacably behind a position that had the backing of 29 percent of the people. (This number on repeal, by the way, is in line with most recent polls, which find the percentage favoring repeal to be in the low 30s, like this one; I should note that there was recently one poll, by AP, which put the repeal number much higher, at 41. I bet you can guess which of those polls has received more media coverage.) They’d be murdered in the press. Out of touch elitists.

But it’s one of the key rules of lazy political journalism that Republicans are the heartland and by definition can’t be out of touch with it (rules dreamed up, by the way, mostly by people from the Eastern seaboard who went to private universities and haven’t the slightest idea in the world about the actual heartland). Only Democrats can be. That’s how it can come to pass that liberals and Democrats can be defending a law whose major provisions enjoy broad support, and a law that most Americans have come around to accepting as a part of life that they’ll learn to live with, and be called out of touch. And it’s why John Barrasso can get away with making evidence-free allegations on Sunday morning television. But remember: Unwell people are getting health coverage for the first time in their lives by the millions. The people who are in charge of our “perception” will catch up with reality someday.

 

By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 31, 2014

April 1, 2014 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, GOP, Obamacare | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Wonk Gap”: The GOP’s Near Complete Lack Of Expertise On Anything Of Substance

On Saturday, Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming delivered the weekly Republican address. He ignored Syria, presumably because his party is deeply conflicted on the issue. (For the record, so am I.) Instead, he demanded repeal of the Affordable Care Act. “The health care law,” he declared, “has proven to be unpopular, unworkable and unaffordable,” and he predicted “sticker shock” in the months ahead.

So, another week, another denunciation of Obamacare. Who cares? But Mr. Barrasso’s remarks were actually interesting, although not in the way he intended. You see, all the recent news on health costs has been good. So Mr. Barrasso is predicting sticker shock precisely when serious fears of such a shock are fading fast. Why would he do that?

Well, one likely answer is that he hasn’t heard any of the good news. Think about it: Who would tell him?

My guess, in other words, was that Mr. Barrasso was inadvertently illustrating the widening “wonk gap” — the G.O.P.’s near-complete lack of expertise on anything substantive. Health care is the most prominent example, but the dumbing down extends across the spectrum, from budget issues to national security to poll analysis. Remember, Mitt Romney and much of his party went into Election Day expecting victory.

About health reform: Mr. Barrasso was wrong about everything, even the “unpopular” bit, as I’ll explain in a minute. Mainly, however, he was completely missing the story on affordability.

For the truth is that the good news on costs just keeps coming in. There has been a striking slowdown in overall health costs since the Affordable Care Act was enacted, with many experts giving the law at least partial credit. And we now have a good idea what insurance premiums will be once the law goes fully into effect; a comprehensive survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that on average premiums will be significantly lower than those predicted by the Congressional Budget Office when the law was passed.

But do Republican politicians know any of this? Not if they’re listening to conservative “experts,” who have been offering a steady stream of misinformation. All those claims about sticker , for example, come from obviously misleading comparisons. For example, supposed experts compare average insurance rates under the new system, which will cover everyone, with the rates currently paid by a handful of young, healthy people for bare-bones insurance. And they conveniently ignore the subsidies many Americans will receive.

At the same time, in an echo of the Romney camp’s polling fantasies, other conservative “experts” are creating false impressions about public opinion. Just after Kaiser released a poll showing a strong majority — 57 percent — opposed to the idea of defunding health reform, the Heritage Foundation put out a poster claiming that 57 percent of Americans want reform defunded. Did the experts at Heritage simply read the numbers upside down? No, they claimed, they were referring to some other poll. Whatever really happened, the practical effect was to delude the right-wing faithful.

And the point is that episodes like this have become the rule, not the exception, on the right. How many Republicans know, for example, that government employment has declined, not risen, under President Obama? Certainly Senator Rand Paul was incredulous when I pointed this out to him on TV last fall. On the contrary, he insisted, “the size of growth of government is enormous under President Obama” — which was completely untrue but was presumably what his sources had told him, knowing that it was what he wanted to hear.

For that, surely, is what the wonk gap is all about. Political conservatism and serious policy analysis can coexist, and there was a time when they did. Back in the 1980s, after all, health experts at Heritage made a good-faith effort to devise a plan for universal health coverage — and what they came up with was the system now known as Obamacare.

But that was then. Modern conservatism has become a sort of cult, very much given to conspiracy theorizing when confronted with inconvenient facts. Liberal policies were supposed to cause hyperinflation, so low measured inflation must reflect statistical fraud; the threat of climate change implies the need for public action, so global warming must be a gigantic scientific hoax. Oh, and Mitt Romney would have won if only he had been a real conservative.

It’s all kind of funny, in a way. Unfortunately, however, this runaway cult controls the House, which gives it immense destructive power — the power, for example, to wreak havoc on the economy by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. And it’s disturbing to realize that this power rests in the hands of men who, thanks to the wonk gap, quite literally have no idea what they’re doing.

By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 8, 2013

September 9, 2013 Posted by | GOP, Politics | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“No Hope Or Maturity”: The United States Congress, A Confederacy of Losers

On Sunday, Senator Joe Manchin (L-West Virginia) took to the floor of the United States Senate to issue a dramatic understatement of the obvious, saying, “ It is absolutely inexcusable that all of us find ourselves in this place at this time … with no plan and no apparent hope.”

While Senator Manchin’s remarks were intended to express the frustration and annoyance that so many Americans are feeling today, I note that his comments were ‘understated’ because, were he to actually say what many Americans of all political stripes are feeling, he would have found it completely impossible to avoid using the word ‘losers’ in his presentation.

This is, after all, what the legislative body of the world’s greatest superpower has become—a confederacy of losers.

With less than 24 hours remaining in a fiscal cliff drama that anyone and everyone should, by now, recognize as having become all about a craven need for attention being acted out by a bunch of people all too willing to make us pay for their never having been quite popular enough in high school, it should be clear that—no matter what sort of agreement these folks might manage to concoct before midnight tonight, if any—Congress has failed and failed in truly epic fashion.

Losers.

If you doubt this for a moment, I offer up yesterday’s Sunday morning television talk show circuit as Exhibit A.

On a Sunday morning where every single, solitary elected official drawing a federal paycheck should have been locked inside the U.S. Capitol or the White House busily engaging in the process of finding a solution, there was no shortage of politicians who found time to parade themselves before the cameras for the purpose of repeating accusations of blame that have been overused to the point where the sting of recrimination was long ago lost.

It began with President Obama’s appearance on “Meet the Press” where he devoted far too much of the interview placing the blame for this travesty onto the shoulders of the Congressional Republicans.

As much as I might agree with the President—and I do—I’ve done enough negotiating to know that if you really want to get to a deal, you are going to find it extremely counter-productive to throw accusations and blame into the air during the final hours of the negotiation. Every moment of Obama’s interview would have been better spent selling his fellow Americans on why his approach is the best path for the nation to take.

Naturally, the Congressional Republicans—for whom “maturity” is as much a four-letter word as “compromise”— could not help but take the bait as they fanned out through the TV landscape to hurl accusations at the President.

My favorite pre-school tongue lashing came from the mouth of Senator John Barrasso (L-Wyoming) who, appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union”, chiming in with, “The president is doing nothing about the addiction that his administration has to spending. He’s the spender in chief.”

Is anyone else troubled by the fact that this childish bit of overused hyperbole is the best one of our elite group of 100 can muster at a time of national trouble?

Even those politicians clever enough to keep their mugs off the screen—so as to at least appear to be working on a deal—had to be heard.

Speaker John Boehner (L-Ohio) could not resist returning the President’s fire with a statement reading, “I am pleased Senators from both parties are currently working to find a bipartisan solution that can finally pass that chamber. That is the type of leadership America needs, not what they saw from the president this morning.”

One would think that Speaker Boehner and his staff would have had more important things to do on this particular Sunday morning than wasting time engaging in a useless school yard fight.

After watching these elected officials publicly waste their time and our tax dollars filling the Sunday morning airwaves with recriminations, I could not help but draw a comparison between these Congressional losers posing on Sunday morning television and those who do their jobs in the public view after the talk shows end and the remainder of a Sunday’s entertainment begins.

How, I wondered, would we respond if NFL players behaved like our elected officials?

Make no mistake-Congress is a team, even if it is one filled with players with differing points of view when it comes to the game plan. I know it is difficult to view them in this manner, as one can barely remember a time when Congress played like a team, but that is precisely what they are intended to be.

Imagine if players on an NFL squad behaved like those who comprise the team we call the United States Congress. Imagine how you would feel if the players on an NFL team went into a critical game more focused on laying blame on team members in anticipation of a loss than coming together to accomplish a critical win?

This would be completely unacceptable to any NFL fan.

Why?

Because even if you hate the quarterback, you are always going to root for the team to win.

For the simple reason that we would never tolerate it, player behavior that is commonplace in Congress is exceedingly rare in the NFL. It is rare because we expect—and we get—more professionalism, maturity and team play from our football players than we do from our elected officials.

No matter what your political preferences, that is a fact that should deeply disturb you.

Now, if you’ve noticed that throughout this article I have replaced the traditional “R” and “D” party identification that typically follows the name of an elected officials (ie. (R-OH) with a designation of “L”—rest assured that these were not typos.

Until our elected officials grow up and accept the responsibility that comes with holding power—whether they be Republicans or Democrats—I prefer to give them the designation they truly deserve—“L” for loser.

I suggest you do the same.

 

By: Rick Ungar, Contributor, Forbes, December 31, 2012

December 31, 2012 Posted by | Congress | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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