You know what the big deal about ACA enrollments is this time? That it's no big deal.
That will not stop Republicans claiming that Obamacare is the disaster to end all disasters, just that they are not going to argue with any intensity that the numbers are not the numbers. Look for a push in the opposite direction: It is the very hugeness of the numbers of people covered in one way or another under the ACA that is the problem, as I will explain below the sigil of the Great Orange Socialists.
The problem for our side is that the public loves the provisions in the ACA, but still dislikes Obamacare enough to think that voting for Republicans will get them more of what they want. And the same for gun laws and almost every other Progressive policy that Democrats refuse to run on. But you have heard enough of that lately.
So we will concentrate on Republicanthink and actual numbers.
When Ignorance is Strength, Help is Harm
We have already seen elements of this strategy of claiming that help from the government is bad for you (unless you are in the 1%, of course), or more to the point the government helping Democrats with legal, economic, and social justice is bad for Republicans, going back to Bill Kristol in 1993, and indeed to Sunny Jim Reagan and the American Medical Association inveighing against Socialized Medicine when LBJ was pushing for Medicare. (LBJCare? JohnsonCare? LyndonCare? How times have changed.)
Specifically, entitlements including Social Security, Unemployment, Health Care, school lunches, SNAP, and the rest, must inevitably make recipients lazy and enslave them to the Democrats. Further, this is the Democratic Party's sole purpose.
Bruce Watson at Daily Finance has gathered several notable examples of past Republican bloviation on this subject, along with data that should flummox your Fox-channeling uncle.
Entitlements: A Hammock for the Lazy or a Safety Net for All of Us?
Rick Santorum Compares Entitlement Programs To ‘Guy With A Dime Bag’
The GOP’s “entitlement society” myth [Newt and Mitt]
Romney sees choice between ‘entitlement society’ and ‘opportunity society’
Rick Santorum Town Hall Meeting
More on the narcotic of government dependency.
Here are a few Republicans who have compared "entitlements" to slavery, either claiming that slavery was good for slaves because their owners took care of them, or that entitlements are bad for free people because they are the bad kind of slavery:
- Jim Brown (R-AZ failed)
- Zach Dasher (R-LA failed)
- Jan Morgan, 2nd Amendment Advocate and Independent Constitutional Conservative
- Dr. Timothy Johnson, founder of the right-wing Frederick Douglass Foundation
My fearless prediction: We will hear more and worse Republicans get louder and nastier about these and other matters in the next two years. What in particular they will seize on to make those claims I cannot predict, but I can be certain that they will be as meaningless as all of the claims about the supposed failures of the ACA that brainwrap has been debunking for more than a whole year now (as opposed to the real, teeth-grinding failures of several state exchanges and healthcare.gov).
Meanwhile, Back at the Evidence-Based World
We have a lot of ACA signups news to catch up on. There are lots of numbers, of course, because almost all of the exchanges are working this time, with glitches only in California and Washington state. All of the disasters from last time have been fixed or totally replaced.
Except the Republican Party disaster. When can we ditch them and get a new party of big business without the racism, homophobia, misogyny, nativism, science denialism and other assorted hatreds? Yes, I know, when we stop growing so many racists etc. and when more of the previous crop of angry White guys dies off in the normal manner. We're actually making progress on that, but that is not this story.
They have asked SCOTUS to block subsidies on the Federal exchange. They are planning to repeal Obamacare as soon as the Republican-majority Senate convenes in January, or failing that, to defund all or part of Obamacare, and never mind the Presidential veto power. There is still talk of suing the President, or impeaching the President, or shutting down the government. But those are not this story, either.
The Supreme Court is going to have a second whack at the ACA in the King v. Burwell case. The argument is that subsidies are provided in the text of the law only for state-run exchanges, not for the Federal exchange. The counter-argument is of course that the Feds are only running state exchanges for states that refused to do it themselves.
This story is still about people signing up for insurance or other health care programs within the ACA, because it still exists, it is working better than ever, and people who use it really like it.
Here is our target for Feb. 15, 2015:
My official state-level exchange QHP projections for the 2015 Open Enrollment Period are
TOTAL, all states plus DC: 12,000,000 by 2/15/15 (10.6 million to be paid)
brainwrap
That's manual renewals plus new signups, not counting off-exchange QHPs or Medicaid or SHOP or anything else. (Glossary) Don't worry. We have plenty more numbers coming.
More to Come
After a very slow start, for which I apologize (I'm feeling much better now, and no, I don't want to talk about it), I have been digging into the backlog of data at ACASignups. So much to explain! Let's talk about the two deadlines tomorrow, 12/15 for renewals and 2/15 for new signups, and what sort of ramping up we can expect in order to hit those 12,000,000 and 10,600,000 numbers.