Once upon a time, conservatives fought the implementation of any health care reform law tooth and nail. They lost. And then they proposed a bill to repeal it. And lost again. And then proposed 50 bills to repeal it, and lost 50 times. And then they ran on Obamacare in 2012, and lost that too. Big time.
And then, after working so hard to deny people affordable health care, these same jokers were OUTRAGED when HealthCare.gov launched and didn't work. Why, people couldn't sign up for the insurance they didn't want people to have in the first place!
Confusing, right? But it got worse. Because even once the website started improving, bit by bit, conservatives started complaining that not enough people were signing up! You see, it was bad that the law provided affordable health care, and it was bad that people couldn't sign up for it, and when they could, it was bad that fewer people were signing up than projected!
If you thought that people shouldn't have affordable health care, wouldn't you be happy that people weren't signing up for it? For example, I think the Ebola virus is bad. So when people don't get it, I'm happy! But conservatives are weird, and apparently they're angry when people don't get the things that conservatives don't like.
But alas, conservative anger at a lack of enrollees has now transformed itself into conservative anger at the 7 million who ended up enrolling after all. All that investment in talking points about "no one wanting Obamacare" laid waste by reality!
But they're not done, because now they're screeching about "how many people have PAID?" Because, apparently, those enrollment numbers don't matter if no one has paid up. Fair enough, that makes some sort of sense. But what happens if people have paid up? Will they then say, "Oh well, guess we were wrong! This law is kind cool after all!" Of course not. So we'll get to see that pivot soon enough, because it turns out the vast majority of people are paying up, to the tune of 90 percent or more per Charles Gaba's calculations.
And if conservatives want to subtract 10 percent from ACA totals, they can knock themselves out! Well, so long as they add in all the off-exchange ACA-compliant plans also sold in the last few months:
Newsy: BlueCrossBlueShield companies sold 1.7 million ACA-compliant policies OFF-exchange between 10/1-3/1. #obamacare
— @GlennKesslerWP
Those are all part of the ACA risk pool, so ... sorry wingnuts, no #DownwardSpiral for you!
To recap, they were angry the law passed, then they were angry that all their repeal efforts didn't pass, then they were angry that they lost their Obamacare referendum in 2012, then they were angry at the broken website that made signing up under the law impossible, then they were angry when the website was fixed, then they were angry at the low number of enrollees because they could fit in a football stadium, then they were angry at the huge numbers of enrollees who would no longer fit in all the football stadiums, and now they're angry that some enrollees might not be paying, and just watch, they'll soon be angry when it turns out almost everyone has paid.
All that anger, all because some people might not die from lack of health insurance. So weird, those people.