Happy people who are now insured
Vox's Sarah Kliff
muses on the "Obamacare paradox," noting that it's working really, really well at the moment and had some
pretty huge successes reported in just this past week. But at the same time, if you look at the headlines,
that's not what you see.
Politically, Obamacare has had a terrible past few weeks. First there was inaccurate enrollment data (the administration wrongly included dental plans). Then there were Jon Gruber's comments on "the stupidity of American voters." And it was capped off with Sen. Chuck Schumer saying that passing the law was a mistake. That led to headlines like: "Dark days ahead for Obamacare," "The Obamacare controversy grows" and my own "Obamacare's terrible, horrible, no good very bad month."
Kliff might not argue against the idea that she kind of whiffed on that last headline, given the reality of Obamacare versus the politics of it, because, as she says "if you look beyond the political fights, the picture looks very different. Obamacare is, policy-wise, having a great month—maybe even the law's best month ever." The uninsured rate is down significantly. People's lives are being saved by hospitals becoming less error-prone. Healthcare spending continues to shrink—a lot. Healthcare.gov is working, and working well. More than 765,000 people selected plans in the first two weeks of open enrollment last month. That's compared to 470,000 in the first
two months of open enrollment last year. Most of those shoppers are finding a lot more to choose from this year, because many insurance companies have joined the market, and that's helping to keep premium increases low, compared to ongoing trends.
So how can a law that's hitting so many policy home runs be such a political disaster? There's an easy first answer, and it's the usual one—a lazy traditional media. They wrote the template on Obamacare four years ago and it was a wholly political one. It was and always has been about the fight to get the law passed, then the fight to get the law repealed. Meanwhile, misinformation about the law still prevails, and four in ten are confused how the law works.
At the same time, they're
hungry for information about the law, and complain that all they get from the news media is coverage of the politics and the controversy. Which, by the way, they're pretty sick of. For months and months, Kaiser Family Foundation surveys
show that people are over the fight, and want the repeal fight to end and the law to be improved. But what the public has been clamoring for all this time—what it really
needs—isn't being provided by the primary source of information they have.
It doesn't help to have the Jon Grubers and Chuck Schumers of the world providing so much fodder, and they pretty much need to just shut up already, unless they're going to provide something that's actually informative. Because as long as a lazy media has sensationalistic quotes to use, they're not going to do any real work digging into the real story here. That story is that millions of people have benefited from this law, and millions more could if the political fight ended.