Posted on 12/10/2013 10:32:06 AM PST by nickcarraway
As healthcare.gov slowly lurches into functionality, the battle lines around the health-care law are returning to their pre-October state. Giddy conservative hopes for the law’s immediate disintegration, or its quick repeal, have ebbed, and in their place opponents have returned to hoping that the law will fail because not many people will want to buy health insurance. Ross Douthat warns, or perhaps fantasizes, that the immediate collapse may have been averted, but the long, slow collapse may yet beckon on the horizon.
The new-old mechanism for the law’s predicted demise is that only the sickest or poorest Americans will enroll — “the law can work only if people who don’t necessarily benefit immediately from its provisions decide to participate anyway,” argues Douthat. But this is a misguided understanding of how insurance works and why people want it, a point that has been demonstrated most convincingly by the eagerness of the toughest Obamacare customer base you can imagine: congressional Republicans.
The still-fresh GOP messaging about the failed website launch turns out to be highly instructive. As part of their message campaign, Republicans in Washington, and their staffers, made displays of their difficulties, or alleged difficulties, enrolling in the new exchanges. For instance, Representative Chuck Fleischmann complained about the website freezing, and being forced to pay high premiums.
Why is he going through the bother and financial cost? “I am not a fan of Obamacare,” Fleischmann told Politico. “But I was bound and determined to try to comply with the law. I’ve done everything in my power to try to do that.” That is an awfully strange way to put it. Remember, a Supreme Court ruling reduced the individual mandate to a mere tax, and Fleischmann could comply with the law by paying a small fee for going without insurance. Instead he is enrolling anyway.
And of course the great hope of the conservative movement has been to foster a massive boycott of the exchanges – burn your (imaginary) Obamacare card, pay the tax instead. The Koch brothers are paying activists to flood college-football tailgate parties, plying undergraduates with free pizza and beer so they’ll listen to their pitch to boycott the exchanges. The Weekly Standard has an unintentionally comic reported dispatch from one such effort in South Bend, Indiana, where conservative activists attempt to drum up enthusiasm among frigid, demoralized Notre Dame undergraduates (“‘If this was a sunny day, this would be packed. Everyone would have their Opt-Out stickers on,’ said Matt Zepeda, a junior.”) Even as they try to goad Americans into following the boycott, conservative activists themselves have blithely ignored it. Salon’s Brian Beutler fruitfully trolled Amanda Carpenter, a speechwriter and senior communications adviser for Ted Cruz, over Carpenter’s high-profile complaints about the slowness of the health-care site, producing this head-smacking confession:
I don’t want to be uninsured. When even as fanatical an ideological cadre as Ted Cruz’s speechwriter blurts her desperation to join Obamacare, it suggests that conservatives have deeply miscalculated.
The problem here is that their definition of who would “benefit” is exceedingly narrow. You “benefit,” by his way of thinking, only if your actuarial costs exceed your financial contributions. But that isn’t how most people think about insurance. Insurance isn’t a kind of gamble where you bet you can beat the house by consuming more in medical care than you pay in premiums and deductibles. It’s protection from risk. People like that protection. They will pay to acquire it.
None of this is to say that the exchanges will quickly and seamlessly fill with desperate customers. It will remain a glitchy, halting process filled with bureaucratic aggravation — much as private insurance has been until now. The botched website rollout gave conservatives a powerful weapon to batter the credibility of Obama and his eponymous law. But the short-term benefits of website bashing also lured them into confessing the hopelessness of their long-term plan.
Egads, Jonathan Chait has penned an utterly worthless article here. No wonder it had to be given a provocative and misleading title to garner any attention. Move on, there is literally nothing to see here.
The closest you can get to “opting out” is to buy insurance yourself direct from the company, not on the exchange. Paying the mandate tax isn’t “opting out,” it’s funding Obamacare with your tax dollars.
Agitprop is what he does and it shows.
It WILL collapse under its own weight at some point.
The insurance companies are unindicted co-conspirators in Obamacare. They want to milk all of those new customers at gunpoint of every dollar they can get before the collapse occurs. And they’ve spread enough money around the RNC to ensure that happens.
They want it to collapse. Then they will have fully socialized medicine.
If I’m not mistaken, he founded it didn’t he?
The Republicans could have stopped Obamacare if they wanted to. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and others tried and would have succeeded but for the GOP bosses that cut their legs off from under them. The same big government loving GOP bosses that made hardcore Taxachusetts liberal Mitt Romenycare their standard bearer.
Some of what you say might be true, but that’s no excuse to fall for this bullshit article and the points raised by Chait.
I believe Ezra Klein did.
And yet, many Freepers are here frothing all over their keyboards, thinking they're onto another piece of juicy info…...
U right…Klein did….Bernstein had a part too……which I had not known at the time.
Hear this Conservatives.
Robert's Revenge is kicking in.
hallelujah!
This idiot fails to recognize that insurance is not the issue with Obamacare. Unlike most other insurance, you can not tailor Obamacare to fit the individual needs and amount of risk one can assume. Obamacare is basically one size fits all. Why should a 27 year old, single male opt for maternity coverage?
The idea behind this piece is to get knee jerk reactions to the title and try to tie republicans to secretly liking Obamacare.
Some of them may be turds, but none of them like Obamacare.
“The Koch brothers are paying activists...”
Lol.
Aren’t the Koch brothers left wing on everything but unions?
Throw the bums out
You can play six degrees of separation tying any mention of The Koch Brothers right back to AFL-CIO activism. (No scientific evidence, just random observation:)
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