He's telling them everything they want to hear about Obamacare.
Continuing the months-long trend, recent Obamacare news has been really good. We know about the fact that
a lot of people have insurance who didn't before, that
premiums for Obamacare plans are going to be very reasonable for 2015, that people enrolled in Obamacare plans
are quite happy with them, and that the people lucky enough to live in Medicaid-expansion states are
particularly grateful. Insurance companies like it, too. There's a
whole bunch more of them joining the exchanges for 2015. Oh, and there are 7.3 million paid-up Obamacare enrollees—a follow-through rate over 90 percent—smashing the Republican narrative that only a small portion of the people getting plans would end up paying for them.
So how is conservative media handling all this? Ezra Klein takes a look and finds what you'd expect: an awful lot of cherry-picking and obfuscating to avoid reporting any positive facts. He points this tweet from reporter Danny Vinnik, who posted this picture of the headlines he was receiving from the conservative YG Network:
Ezra
shoots down that first headline, "More bad news for Obamacare exchange customers," which is relying on a
New York Times story. Actually, it's selectively choosing to report that "in many places premiums are going up by double-digit percentages within many of the most popular plans." What it doesn't include is the next part: "But other plans, hoping to attract customers, are increasing their prices substantially less. In some markets, plans are even cutting prices."
So are conservative readers going to know that, to get the best deal on Obamacare, they should shop around a bit? Not if they only rely on conservative media to find out about it. It's also putting conservatives in a bubble in which they are not getting the message that the law actually does work. That it's not bankrupting people and it's not bankrupting the nation. Of course, cynical Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz want to keep it that way. He's making a cottage industry, and perhaps a 2016 presidential bid, out of trying to keep the repeal embers burning.