Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
In all the media hysteria over the rollout of "ObamaCare," the feckless media villagers always leave out three predicate facts: Chief Justice John Roberts created the Medicaid opt-out with his poorly considered legal opinion upholding the constitutionality of "ObamaCare," opening the door to partisan mischief; second, said partisan mischief did occur with Red State Tea-Publicans refusing to expand Medicaid and denying more than 5 million desperate Americans access to health care; and third, Red State Tea-Publicans refused to set up their own state-run Marketplace insurance exchanges, creating the need for a complex federal system not contemplated. GOP sabotage should be included in every report.
As for all the unhinged media hysteria, Paul Begala at CNN writes Chill: Obamacare snafus are fixable:
[D]espite the bed-wetting from Beltway Chicken Littles, the President's problems are eminently fixable. The Affordable Care Act isn't collapsing. The Obama presidency isn't imploding.
Similarly, Ed Kilgore at the Democratic Strategist looks at the polling that media villagers are so enamored with, and writes in Polling Panic:
What does it all mean? Probably that most people aren't breathlessly following events in Washington other than to register their heat and noise.
Democrats didn't win the 2014 elections in October and they aren't losing them in November. It's time to chill a bit.
So chill out, media villagers. The sky is not falling despite your best efforts to recklessly and irresponsibly panic the public.
Kevin Drum observes that In States Where the Website Works, Obamacare Works Too:
It really is all about the website. In places where it's working, people are signing up and are pretty happy with what they're getting. Rate shock is an issue for a few of them, but not for a lot. The bottom line is the Republican Party's worst nightmare: Once Obamacare has been up and running for a while, it's going to be pretty popular.
The Los Angeles Times reports, Healthcare plan enrollment surges in some states after rocky rollout (Healthcare insurance enrollment increases in some states that run their own exchanges, boosting hopes of Obamacare backers):
Despite the disastrous rollout of the federal government's healthcare website, enrollment is surging in many states as tens of thousands of consumers sign up for insurance plans made available by President Obama's health law.
A number of states that use their own systems, including California, are on track to hit enrollment targets for 2014 because of a sharp increase in November, according to state officials.
"What we are seeing is incredible momentum," said Peter Lee, director of Covered California, the nation's largest state insurance marketplace, which accounted for a third of all enrollments nationally in October. California — which enrolled about 31,000 people in health plans last month — nearly doubled that in the first two weeks of this month.
Several other states, including Connecticut and Kentucky, are outpacing their enrollment estimates, even as states that depend on the federal website lag far behind. In Minnesota, enrollment in the second half of October ran at triple the rate of the first half, officials said. Washington state is also on track to easily exceed its October enrollment figure, officials said.
The growing enrollment in those states is a rare bit of good news for backers of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and suggests that the serious problems with the law's rollout may not be fatal[.]
Fourteen states and the District of Columbia, covering about one-third of the nation's population, are operating their own Obamacare marketplaces and have their own enrollment websites. The others, including most states with Republican-led governments, have declined to do so, making their residents dependent on the malfunctioning federal site.
In addition to better-functioning websites, many states that are running their own marketplaces also have significantly more resources to help consumers sign up for coverage.
Many of the states that have declined to run their own websites have also refused to expand the joint federal-state Medicaid program, as the new law allows.
See how its done, media villagers? The LA Times gets its right by including GOP sabotage in its reporting. You are not informing the public of the whole story when you leave out these critical facts.