I came across the following online article:
OBAMACARE CASUALTY: Cover Oregon officially calls it quits, turns to feds
Cover Oregon on Friday became the first casualty of the state-run ObamaCare exchanges, as officials formally gave up the fight to offer residents a state health care portal.
I was confused, and I was horrified: what was Oregon a casualty to? What had ObamaCare done to make it a casualty? Why had the State quit? Why had it stopped offering its own residents a health care portal? Had ObamaCare flubbed something again?
But then I came across this Reuters article:
Oregon's broken healthcare exchange to shift to federal network
Oregon, whose health insurance network has been dogged by technical glitches that have prevented even a single subscriber from enrolling online, will move its state health exchange to the federal system.
Oh. The Oregon exchange is broken, and Oregon wants a solution that actually works. Seems reasonable.
Then I read this Bloomberg Businessweek article:
Cover Oregon board to decide exchange's future
Oregon is set to make a final decision on whether to become the first state in the nation to drop its problem-plagued online health exchange and link up with the federal website.
...
A top Cover Oregon official said fixing the existing system would be too costly at $78 million and would take too long. Switching to the federal system would cost just $4 million to $6 million.
Oh. The state of Oregon can save $72-74 million dollars AND help its residents secure critical health insurance sooner just by switching to the federal site? Sounds fiscally responsible to me.
And then I read this article:
Oregon Dropping State Online Health Exchange For Federal Site
Cover Oregon's board unanimously approved an advisory committee's recommendation to ditch its troubled portal. Oregon will use HealthCare.Gov for private policies.
...
Oregon's exchange is seen as the worst in more than a dozen states that developed their own online health insurance marketplaces. The general public still can't use Cover Oregon's website to sign up for coverage in one sitting.
Ahhh. The Oregon exchange is acknowledging that its experiment (created by private corporate giant Oracle no less) is
not working, and the leaders entrusted to oversee the project are moving to a solution that actually works, is good for its citizens, and saves everyone money: the wildly successful, if not initially so, ObamaCare federal health exchange. Sounds like good leadership to me.
But had I only read the Fox News piece, which took five paragraphs to include the very clarifying and important context that "fixing the existing system would be too costly at $78 million and would take too long" and that "switching to the federal system would cost just $4 million to $6 million", I would have come away with a swirl of avoidable confusion, misplaced enmity, and misinformation with which to fill future conversations and create inaccurate memes that accord with a particularly pernicious, perfidious paradigmatic pattern of thought: that anything created by the government turns to dung, and that states' efforts are somehow undermined by federal meddling.
We use information and emotions to guide our decisions. When that information is slanted to create the least charitable interpretation of the world around us--when our emotions are contorted by an intentionally misanthropic view of the forces that shape our time--we end up making decisions that hurt those around us and slow society's progress towards true freedom. That's why no one should read Fox News, ever: real progress and real democracy are about asking the right questions, and when those questions are predicated on disinformation, fear, racism, and political polarization, we are all losers.
I'll leave you with a quote by the best former Democratic president to date:
Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt