OPINION
7 million reasons not to repeal the ACA
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n the last signup day for first-year insurance coverage, Ross Douthat, the quasi-official Republican intellectual, wrote an obituary for the forces that hoped to repeal Obamacare when Republicans control all three branches of government. Writing in the corner of the New York Times reserved for conservative orthodoxy, Douthat said repeal won’t happen now because it depended on Obamacare tripping over its complexities and failing miserably to achieve its goal of expanding insurance to a significant part of the population. Four and a half months ago, he wrote that the cataclysmic failure of the Internet portals established for the signups and then the cancellation of substandard insurance plans in December in spite of the president’s promise that insurance companies wouldn’t do that meant that it was possible, maybe likely, that the reforms would be so discredited that Obamacare could be repealed when the party got its majorities.
But with the first-year prediction of 7 million new insurance buyers a certainty in spite of all the adminisERNEST trative glitches and DUMAS with many million more poor workers signed up for Medicaid (200,000 Arkansans by the end of this year), that possibility vanished, Douthat said. Repeal or any serious change that canceled coverage for millions of people, he wrote, will not appeal to even many Republicans and will produce only “a ruinous civil war” in the party. Douthat always viewed the reforms as another welfare-state entitlement like Social Security, Medicare and veterans insurance, which if the law worked would become widely accepted and even popular. While polls show Obamacare still unpopular, Douthat saw signs of its growing popularity like Medicare and Social Security before it. Forlorn as he is about the prospect of
killing the law, Douthat does not call on his party to abandon its plan to use Obamacare to win both houses of Congress this year, the last chance to exploit it. The most successful public-relations ruse in history was to make the Affordable Care Act “Obamacare” in the common parlance, thus linking the reforms to a president who was hated in the South and the deep-red mountain and Midwestern states. Polls show people favor the Affordable Care Act and that all its major features except one, the individual mandate, are wildly popular, and the mandate is a trifle below 50 percent. But approval sinks when people are asked about “Obamacare.” Even as it surpasses the first signup threshold, Obamacare political ads proliferate. As of March 1, 66,000 ads had attacked Democrats and more than 30,000 blamed the Democrats for Obamacare. The number of Obamacare ads is 12 times the number at this stage of congressional races four years ago, when they enabled Republicans to take over the House of Representatives. On almost any website you go to, an ad flashes a picture of Pryor and the words he “told the biggest lie of the year.” Then a very sad Wanda Buckley of Marion tells about how grieved she was when Blue Cross canceled her insurance in spite of Obama’s
promise that she could keep it. There was nothing about Pryor lying, but the ad notes that he voted for the act. And the Arkansas insurance commissioner said Blue Cross could continue to cover Mrs. Buckley and others like her with the substandard plans for another two years. Pryor had seen his high approval ratings four years ago plummet because of the Obamacare attacks, but a year ago he counted on implementation at least neutralizing it as a political issue if not turning it into a positive. The bare numbers ought to bear out his hopes: 200,000 voting-age Arkansans with insurance for the first time, thousands more who had lost insurance because they had pre-existing conditions or their illnesses had become too long and expensive insured again, 500,000 Medicare enrollees who are having their out-of-pocket drug costs lowered and have access to free cancer screenings, 35,000 young adults back on their parents’ insurance, 115,000 Arkansans who got rebates last year because insurance companies spent more of their premiums on profits and overhead than Obamacare allows, 1.3 million whose insurance as of Jan. 1 can never be canceled as long as they pay their premiums. But Pryor voted for Obamacare.
Hard to deny Obamacare
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o it turns out that millions of people dealt with the Affordable Care Act enrollment cutoff pretty much the way they habitually deal with the April 15 income tax filing deadline: procrastinating until the last minute to ensure maximum stress and standing in line. Like mobbing shopping malls on the day after Thanksgiving, it’s the American way of life. One result was predictably negative headlines like this classic in the Washington Post: “HealthCare.gov tumbles on deadline day as consumers race to sign up for insurance.” Because as we all know, temporary computer glitches — which never happen in the flawlessly efficient corporate sector, of course — are the big story here. In the news business, this is called “burying the lede.” It’s the equivalent of a sports story headlined “Third inning errors mar Red Sox World Series win.” Because the real news, sports fans, is that Obamacare has met and even surpassed every enrollment projection. Oddly, millions of last minute shoppers decided they’d be better off with health insurance after all. Who could have guessed? At this writing, it appears that the late buying surge will carry Obamacare beyond the 7 million enrollments projected by the
in American health care some dreamed of, that the number of people without insurbut a creditable start. ance is actually rising.” What’s more, the numbers are dramatiWe await Cruz’s thunderous proof. cally better in states that worked to impleCongressional BudMeanwhile, something else that’s been ment rather than obstruct the Affordable happening right in the face of all those get Office. Too bad, because that quite Care Act. In New York, CNBC reported 59 Koch-financed “Americans for Prosperity” ruins the visual percent of those buying health insurance ads lamenting that the Affordable Care Act effect of a comithrough the state’s marketplace had been “just doesn’t work,” is that the law’s popupreviously uninsured. In Kentucky, it’s 75 larity among the public has been steadily cally misleading Fox GENE News bar graph that percent — immeasurably improving the rising. The latest ABC News/Washington LYONS Post poll released this week shows Obamcontrived to make lives of rural Kentuckians particularly. How long will their neighbors, in, say, acare supported by more Americans than the 6 million citizens enrolled as of last week appear to be a small fraction of the 7 million Tennessee be able to hold out against oppose it, albeit by a scant margin of 49 to 48 percent. CBO projection, rather than 84 percent of it. Obamacare as word gets around? An alert basset hound wouldn’t have been So how are Republicans whose conInterestingly, 36 percent of selffooled. Do they think viewers are morons? gressmen have voted 50 times to repeal the described conservatives now support the But more about what Ed Kilgore calls law handling the unwelcome good news? law, as opposed to 17 percent last Novem“Obamacare denialism” to come. According About the way they dealt with allegedly ber. How that will play into November 2014 to a Rand Corp. study reported in the Los “skewed” poll numbers back in 2012. Who congressional elections remains to be seen. Angeles Times, along with the 7 million can forget the Weekly Standard’s bold elec- However, it’s already become clear to the newly enrolled in private insurance plans, tion eve prediction? “New Projection of saner sorts of conservative thinker that the roughly 4.5 million previously uninsured Election Results: Romney 52, Obama 47.” Affordable Care Act is here to stay. Americans have enrolled in Medicaid since According to pundit Fred Barnes, a 10-point The market has spoken. The political the new law came online last November. Romney landslide was entirely likely. rebellion and/or actuarial collapse dreamed Another 3 million young adults gained The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn of on the right clearly to happen. coverage through their parents’ insurance summarizes: “[Republicans] are doing Longer term, Obamacare denialism plans, as Obamacare allows. what they almost always do when data appears even more futile. The ever-preRand estimates that another 9 million confounds their previously held beliefs. scient Kevin Drum points out that RepubAmericans have bought directly from insur- They are challenging the statistics — pri- licans can’t dream of repealing the law as ance companies, although many of those marily, by suggesting that most of the peo- long as its namesake lives in the White were previously insured. Overall, the unin- ple getting insurance already had coverage. House. And by 2017 the CBO estimates sured rate has dropped from an estimated Some, like Senator John Barrasso of Wyo- the law’s benefits will extend to 36 mil20.9 percent to 16.6 percent in the law’s ming, say the administration is ‘cooking the lion Americans — a formidable constitufirst year—hardly the sudden revolution books.’ Others, like Senator Ted Cruz, say ency indeed. www.arktimes.com
APRIL 3, 2014
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