It's not nice to call people names. Birther. Truther. Benghazer. Deather. Obamacare Dead-Ender. it's not nice, but if the shoe fits - wear it like a Ferragamo, pal. Josh Marshall over at TPM discovered this when he dared to tweet that the total Affordable Care signups (including Private Exchanges, Medicaid Expansion, and Young Adults able to maintain care on their parents plan) as of the start of 2014 is very likely 10 Million, using the most current and accurate data which is that supplied and compiled by our very own Brainwrap.
When faced with these numbers, those who cling tenaciously to the view that ObamaCare is the "End of our Civilization, our Freedom, our Democracy, our Free Markets, White Christmas and the Sacred White Baby Jesus" will howl and cry in abject rage and denial as Josh describes.
Now, as I said up at the top, there are a lot of Obamacare dead-enders out there who just blow a gasket when they make first contact with these numbers. The first claim is that Medicaid expansion somehow doesn't count. Or it doesn't count if a 24 year old is now covered under their parents policy because well that happened a while ago or well, something.
The best dead-ender argument is that well, maybe these people who've signed up for subsidized private insurance policies won't end up paying their premiums. When the arguments get down to this level you know you're dealing with a deep and intense form of denial. I mean, what if all these people change their mind next month and decide they don't want the coverage after all? What if Obamacare is so bad they all die in the Spring? What if Spartacus had an airplane? If you really, really are hoping for bad news you can come up with anything to keep hope, as it were, alive.
Yes, they will. They will wheedle, and twirl, and duck and dodge the facts like Brian Boitano on Rocket Skates. It doesn't matter how many times President Obama releases his original long form Birth Certificate. it doesn't matter what an in depth NYT report says about the intensity of response to an Anti-Muslim Video. It doesn't matter how many times people point out that there are
No Death Panels in the Affordable Care Act, and that
all most of what the Dreaded Independent Payment Advisory Board does is issue a set of recommendations to Congress.
It does not matter. what. the. facts. are. to these people. The Facts have a Liberal Bias. The Facts are Skewed just like the 2012 Election Polls were. They can't Handle, the Facts.
As I wrote not that long ago, the Success of the ACA means the Destruction of the GOP which was based largely on a Greg Sargent piece which asked "What Do Republicans Say if ObamaCare Works?"
Republicans will have spent weeks expressing outrage on behalf of Americans who have been unable to tap into the benefits of Obamacare because of administration incompetence, and on behalf of people who are “losing” coverage because of outrageous liberal Big Government overreach. At that point, though, the web site will be working, and untold numbers of people will be shopping for real, tangible plans. Many on the individual market will find plans that are better, and potentially even cheaper overall — whether because of subsidies, or because the plans don’t disguise their true long term cost, as the current, crappy ones do – than their previous ones. None of this is a given, obviously; again, it all turns on whether the law works.
But if it does, what is the Republican argument at that point? Continue to push for full repeal, which would wipe away the benefits that these Americans — the very same people Republicans were professing to speak for in expressing outrage over the web site — are now enjoying?
Greg of course assumes that the GOP push against Obamacare is, or ever was, based on anything factual or logical. It. is. Not.
What Republicans will say when ObamaCare begins to work - is that It Doesn't.
That's what they'll say. They'll simply deny it.
We already saw a preview of this when Rep Ellmers (R-A Village Still Missing an AR15) folllowing a report by Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear that their own state exchange was signing up thousands of people despite problems with the Federal Site, Simply Denied This Was the Case.
Beshear: We’re signing up people at roughly a thousand a day. It’s a great rate and a great success so far,” he told on CNN’s “New Day,” describing the market as “a gold standard because it’s working.”...
[The Federal System] will be working fully in a month or two. History shows us that [after the implication of Medicare] it took two years to get it all working properly. This will all work.
ELLMERS: I know you had the clip of the governor and God bless him. He’s talking about a situation that he supports. American people cannot wait for this. There are hard working taxpayers –
CAROL COSTELLO (HOST): Was the governor joshing us? Is he not telling the truth?
ELLMERS: I’m not exactly sure it is working in Kentucky…..
COSTELLO: So the governor when he says he’s signing up 1,000 people a day and wants to get the 640,000 people in Kentucky insured, he’s just saying that for political purposes?
ELLMERS: Well, you know, let’s look again at the grand scheme of things. It is a failure at monumental levels. [...]
So you see, Up is Down. Green is Blue. Red and Yellow. The Sky is the Floor. Gravity falls Upwards and ObamaCare is a Failure, even when it's not.
It could have been easy to shrug this off when Ellmer's originally said it, but you can see from the chart of the Generic Congressional Ballot during 2013, the general lead the Democrats had, and the giant lead they had as a result of the Republican Shutdown Threat in their last ditch attempt to prevent the implementation of the ACA, has turned into an advantage for Republicans once the Website Glitches and the problems with Cancelled/Grandfathered Plans began to surface. That's not good.
Democrats are starting this year off with a razor thin advantage of 0.2%, and under those circumstances it doesn't help our ability to take back the House this year when we get
Friendly Fire against the ACA like this.
That is the dirty little secret many liberals have avoided saying out loud for fear of aiding the president’s enemies, at a time when the ideal of universal health care needed all the support it could get.
...
I believe Obamacare’s rocky start — clueless planning, a lousy website, insurance companies raising rates, and the president’s telling people they could keep their coverage when, in fact, not all could — is a result of one fatal flaw: The Affordable Care Act is a pro-insurance-industry plan implemented by a president who knew in his heart that a single-payer, Medicare-for-all model was the true way to go. When right-wing critics “expose” the fact that President Obama endorsed a single-payer system before 2004, they’re actually telling the truth.
What we now call Obamacare was conceived at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and birthed in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney, then the governor. The president took Romneycare, a program designed to keep the private insurance industry intact, and just improved some of its provisions. In effect, the president was simply trying to put lipstick on the dog in the carrier on top of Mitt Romney's car. And we knew it.
God Bless Michael Moore, he's been a champion on this for a long, long time including when he had to go toe-to-toe with Dr. Sangay Gupta and the still Sith-Lord version of Wendell Potter as then head of Cigna Communications before he found the Light, but this is wrong thing to say at the wrong time.
I mean he's right of course on that facts, I just wouldn't put it that way. There's a reason most progressives and liberals don't say this, because it's putting fresh red chum right into the jaws of Republicans and none of us need that right now. I would say, in contrast to Moore, that the reason Republicans can't seem to come up with their own alternative to ObamaCare is because Obamacare is already Implementing Their Ideas of a Market-Centered set of reforms. It even includes the ability to purchase insurance across State Lines (under the Multi-State Plan Program) so they've got nothing left other than to grasp futilely at the mirage of "tort reform" and otherwise Complain, Deny, Fold, Spindle and Mutilate the Truth. if you want to complain honestly about the ACA's shortcomings, most of them come from placing too much trust the insurance market, and failing to offer a clear public alternative such as a Medicare-For-All or for that matter Single-Payer.
ObamaCare doesn't have a "Fatal Flaw", it's got a couple bugs in the system and those bugs can be fixed if the plan is made more progressive rather than more conservative [because it already is pretty darn conservative] or otherwise scrapped.
If the long-term goal is to fix those bugs, close all these loopholes and correct the problems in the ACA, then the short term goal needs to be Take Back The House because we just aren't going to get one, without the other. Period.
Those of us who were here and closely paying attention at the time knew that the ACA barely survived Congress by the teeth of it's skin the first time around when we had Democratic Majorities in both Houses. It was a hard arduous slog that went on for nearly a year to get it through committee after committee, and Democrats spent month after month trying to get Republicans to sign on to the Bill. We all know they never did, and that the process just watered down the bill to near mush. But it got through. It passed. And now it's being implemented, something all the coulda, shoulda, woulda's in the world can't change. We have to start looking forward, not backward.
And we have to recognize what we're still up against. That this fight isn't nearly over. That even with Obama Implementing a fix for the Plan Cancellation Problem the first thing that Republicans do in response, rather than say "Thanks, Obama!" is start gearing up to file lawsuits and break the fix because clearly we just can't have nice things can we?
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey sent a letter on Thursday to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius questioning the constitutionality of the president’s latest executive action that allowed insurance companies to continue offering plans that had been cancelled. The letter, signed by attorneys general from Republican-dominated states including Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas and Virginia, called the rule change “flatly illegal under federal constitutional and statutory law.” - See more at: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/...
Yet the ACA, as it is already written, says this when it comes to keeping your existing plan.
SEC. 1251 ø42 U.S.C. 18011¿. PRESERVATION OF RIGHT TO MAINTAIN
EXISTING COVERAGE.
(a) NO CHANGES TO EXISTING COVERAGE.—
(1) IN GENERAL.—Nothing in this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) shall be construed to require that an individual terminate coverage under a group health plan or health insurance coverage in which such individual was enrolled on the date of enactment of this Act.
The fact that insurance companies decided to ignore the clear intent of this provision and carve out loopholes that let them
Up-Sell and Scam their clients is not entirely the President's fault. That's just
what they do and what they're going to keep doing if the think they can get away with it. That's how a Rube Goldberg Mouse Trap of Regulations works, or sometimes doesn't work. So you have to go in and fix it. Then fix it again.
To correct this all the President did was remind us all and reaffirm that local State insurance Commissioners had the authority to set what the rules are in their own State including the ability to prevent the false cancellation of plans that should have been grandfathered under the ACA, but he didn't implement any big Federal Solution. Grandfathered plans were already exempt from many of the coverage mandates, so saying they're still exempt for another year was simply redundant. For the real solution he let the States handle it, and now 11 Republican State Attorney Generals are saying he needed Congress to let the States handle it? How's that supposed to work?
Since the starting Republican Position on this is to be against their own ideas, it's only natural that their fall-back positions begin to look more and more psychotic as time goes on.
But I don't think we can let their failure to make any G-D sense be the only thing we can depend on in November of 2014. They may be behaving like a pack of rabid sociopaths, but we have to recall that they are shrewd sociopaths.
With a Rank-n-File that will believe any lie about ObamaCare and disbelieve anything true about it, they have a solid base of Dead-Enders they can depend on. The last few months have been rough, but we can't let that be an excuse for not amping up the pressure and making sure not only that the Affordable Care Act succeeds, but that the American People Know that it is succeeding and that where it has problems, we need to Do More, Not Less.
That goes not just for 2014, but also for 2016 and 2020 as well.
We do this right and there won't be another Republican Congress or a Republican President again - for generations. And Good Riddance too.
Vyan