If Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein is any indication, liberal members of the so-called “reality-based” community have developed a new strategy for dealing with Obamacare’s myraid failures: just pretend the bad stuff isn’t real.
Stein revealed the apparent new strategy on Twitter yesterday afternoon.
“Yes, some health insurance is getting pricier,” he wrote. “Yes, some people who couldn’t buy insurance now can. The tit4tat anecdote game kinda sucks.”
Yes, some health insurance is getting pricier. Yes, some people who couldn't buy insurance now can. The tit4tat anecdote game kinda sucks
— Sam Stein (@samstein) October 28, 2013
Stein’s tweet has everything: deliberate conflation of terms (asserting that clear data is merely anecdote), assertion without demonstration (the overwhelming evidence is that people who want insurance can’t buy it because of the inoperable web site), and false equivalence (I’ll agree to ignore your verifiable data, which just so happens to destroy numerous 2009-era promises about Obamacare, if you agree to ignore my silly attempt to prop up the health care law’s disastrous roll-out).
Apparently being pro-Science™ means re-labeling data as anecdote and then patting yourself on the back for not falling for those silly anecdotes. Such courage. Such integrity. Because if there’s one thing we know about journalism, it’s that a news story never begins and ends with an anecdote.
But back to the data. Health care analyst Avik Roy crunched the numbers from insurance filings in 13 states and Washington, D.C. (37 states had yet to file their data at the time of his analysis) and found that health insurance premiums would increase by an average of 24 percent. In some states, like New Mexico, premiums are likely to double. Now, some people will certainly see lower net premiums thanks to taxpayer-provided subsidies. But the overall effect of Obamacare on the insurance market, based on voluminous data, is inarguable: the law’s requirements are increasing the cost of health insurance.
Unfortunately, premium shock isn’t the only problem for families. Some are losing their coverage altogether. Thus far, insurers have announced that nearly 1.5 million people have lost their health coverage in the wake of Obamacare’s enactment. Florida Blue cancelled 300,000 policies. CareFirst cancelled 76,000 policies in the Washington, D.C. metro area. 800,000 people lost their insurance coverage in New Jersey. In California, Kaiser cancelled 160,000 policies. Meanwhile, premiums are set to rise in 45 of 50 states under the new Obamacare requirements.
Liberal defenders of the health law would respond to those facts by saying that the cancelled coverage was likely sub-standard — after all, Obamacare created minimum essential coverage requirements for you rubes who are too dumb to know what coverage you need and can afford — so of course those policies had to be cancelled. One major problem with this defense is that it contradicts the notion that Obamacare would make health insurance cheaper. If it’s so much better, why on earth would it cost less?
The other problem with the “it’s better coverage” defense is that it also requires one to ignore the infamous presidential promise that “if you like your private health insurance plan, you can keep it.”
Don’t worry, though. Sam Stein figured out how to nip that one in the bud.
@ron_fournier WH sold an impractical vision. But that was the lesson they drew from the Clinton yrs. People didn't want TOO much change
— Sam Stein (@samstein) October 28, 2013
Translation: Of course the White House had to lie, and good on them for finally learning the lesson of those honesty-plagued rubes who ran the Clinton White House.
Brilliant analysis, Sam. Whatever you do, don’t ever change.
