I've had some rather lengthy discussions with my conservative friends of late that have led me to the same conclusion as Jamelle Bouie: No matter the facts, the GOP is committed to the message that Obamacare has failed.
The Republican complaints of two months ago were purely opportunistic. For them, it just doesn’t matter if Healthcare.gov is working, since Obamacare is destined to fail, reality be damned! At most, the broken website was useful fodder for attacks on the administration. Now that it’s made progress, the GOP will revert to its usual declarations that the Affordable Care Act is a hopeless disaster. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Americans have gained access to health insurance thanks to the Medicaid expansion or the exchanges, and many more will join their ranks as the deadline for coverage approaches.
They are completely inconsolable and it seems they want to stay that way.
3 comments:
It's equally true that no matter how wretched the site, how bug-ridden and garbled the information the back-end spews out to insurers is, no matter the what bad results come in, Markadelphians will cheer it as a great, if slightly troubled, success. No matter what, they will be "dizzy with success."
As long as you are unable to objectively define what success is, any declaration of success is a worthless gesture.
Witness: "hundreds of thousands of Americans have gained access to health insurance thanks to the Medicaid expansion or the exchanges, and many more will join their ranks as the deadline for coverage approaches. "
How many have lost coverage? That's kind of a direct metric comparison isn't it?
At what monetary cost have these 'hundreds of thousands' gained access? That's a measure for success of a program isn't it? You could trumpet a program that gives, for example, poor people laptop computers. But if the cost to do so is orders of magnitude above simply giving them the money to purchase a computer then the so-called success isn't very successful.
Mark has not quantified what success means using any reliable, objective metrics.
Damn, even I wouldn't have associated you with Jamelle. That is one fucking stupid dude.
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