Finally!

By Carl

The day has arrived when Obamacare comes out of rehearsals and goes fully live, and guess what? It’s already outperformed expectations:

The first yearly sign-up period for Obamacare closes today, with early returns suggesting the administration may near a projection of 7 million enrollees made before the U.S. health exchange struggled at its startup.

The rollout has been under constant attack from Republican foes and faced a key U.S. Supreme Court (1000L:US) decision that allowed states to limit the Medicaid expansion that was an important part of the plan. It also suffered from myriad technical flaws in the website that made it unusable for more than a month.

The government last week said 6 million Americans had enrolled by March 27 and about 1 million people a day were visiting healthcare.gov. The sign-ups met a mark set by the Congressional Budget Office in February that was reduced from an initial 7 million estimate after the law’s troubled start in October. Republicans questioned the credibility of the numbers.

So not only has it outperformed the reduced expectations of the bipartisan controlled Congressional Budget Office, it has likely exceeded even the original estimates which were pegged as “too high” and too difficult to achieve!

Well, alright now!

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Again: No conservative healthcare ideas

By Frank Moraes

Ezra Klein seems to have gotten everyone all talking about how Republicans are suddenly against high deductible healthcare plans,Obamacare Exposes Republican Hypocrisy on Health Care. You see, in the old days (last week), Republicans said, "We need high deductible plans that people can afford but also put the onus on them to manage their healthcare. They've been saying this fordecades. This is where those lauded health savings accounts come in. This was a great thing to complain about! Obamacare was stopping the market from working it's magic!

There was one small problem. And from a Republican standpoint, it wasn't a problem at all. Obamacare didn't have anything to say about cheap, high deductible insurance plans. Remember: Obamacare is the the conservative "free market" approach to healthcare reform. So the Republicans turn the "problem" into an "opportunity." They turned on a dime and started shouting, "Obamacare is killing people with these high deductible insurance plans!" Ezra Klein calls this hypocrisy.

Jonathan Chait calls it, The Heritage Uncertainty Principle. You can go over and read his article, if you want. But this is what I've been writing about for years. Let's start with the facts: Republicans do not want any healthcare reform. So when the Republicans turned against Obamacare, even though it was their very own healthcare reform policy, they weren't being hypocritical. Chait quotes Newt Gingrich saying, "[I]t started as a conservative effort to stop HillaryCare in the 1990s." And that's what I've been saying: any Republican healthcare "idea" is only one they support so long as it isn't up for consideration.


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Obamacare website on the mend

By Frank Moraes

Jonathan Chait has written a welcome salve for us liberals still bothered by the problems that have

plagued the Healthcare.gov website, Obamacare Hyperventilation to Continue Forever! It is important to remember the "dog bites man" aspect of modern journalism. Things that don't go wrong are not news. Thus we hear about what's going wrong with Obamacare and completely miss everything that is going right with it.

Chait mentions any number of the "right" things. Perhaps the biggest thing is that Obamacare has been in effect for years. It is only the exchanges that are six weeks old. And these other parts have been going really well. Healthcare costs have been lower than expected. People with preexisting conditions have been able to get insurance. And kids have been able to stay on their parents policies. Even since the rollout of the exchanges, things have gone pretty well. People are signing up for the Medicaid expansion at a good clip. The state run exchanges are working really well. And the website is getting fixed.

The main point of his article is that it just isn't true that Democrats are abandoning Obamacare. It is all just wishful thinking on the part of conservatives with a major assist by the mainstream press who would just love the feeding frenzy of an actual Democratic Party war. After the coverage of the supposed civil war in the Republican Party, you would think that everyone would just calm down. But no. And in a couple of months it will be like it never happened.

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No comparison

By Mustang Bobby

No, the roll-out of Obamacare is not comparable to Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq war, or the troubles of Mayor Rob Ford.

Making such comparisons only proves that Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy was more of a documentary than people give it credit for.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)