Anecdata

Remember all those Obamacare horror stories? Not looking so bad now.

Oh, really? Why? Well, read the piece. But how did this happen?

The failure of the exchanges created an information vacuum as far as Obamacare successes went; in rushed the individual stories of those who claimed to have been hurt by the changes to the market. It didn't matter that these stories are, even without enrollment numbers from the exchanges, demonstrably unrepresentative! 

In steps...anecdata!

Statisticians dismiss the practice of using personal stories to argue about an objective reality as "anecdata", but it might be more accurate to call the "Obamacare horror stories" that have taken over social media "urban legends". There are urban legends about a lot of things – from spiders in hairdos to red velvet cake. Some are funny, some feature a satisfying come-uppance, but folklorists agree that the stickiest of them, the ones that last for generations and resist debunking are the ones that live off ignorance and feed off fear. As one researcher put it: "It's a lack of information coupled with these fears that tends to give rise to new legends. When demand exceeds supply, people will fill in the gaps with their own information … they'll just make it up."

I can't think of a better description of the conservative media ecosystem at the moment. 

Neither can I.  I quite enjoyed the torpedoeing of some of the more prominent "horror" stories.