I'm seeing an encouraging trend. Even on comments sections at progressive bastions like The New York, New York Magazine, the L.A. Times, and the Washington Post, the sentiment is vehement and very nearly unanimous against the Obamacare rollout. A lot of things about the program are confusing, but the idea that millions of Americans are losing their insurance invokes the crystal clear, infuriating memory of the repeated promise "If you like your plan, you can keep it. Period." The sticker-shock is dramatic. There are critical comments on many centrist or left-of-center sites (not just National Review or the Wall Street Journal) getting hundreds of up votes and zero down, which I've never seen before. Something's changing. To the occasional complaint that any opposition to the plan is a vote for heartless treatment of the uninsured, the routine answer is "Where is your compassion for the millions of people losing their insurance?" It's not just the broken website that's a problem any more.
Is it possible that the Obama administration has finally overplayed its hand? The arguments in support of Obamacare are increasingly desperate--it's really a Republican plan, it's too soon to panic over a few unimportant glitches, if people are losing their insurance we're really doing them a favor--and they're being met with derision. Even better, they're being met with some clear thinking about why it's wrong for the proponents to make these decisions for other people, and to dragoon other people into their misguided redistributionist ambitions. Suddenly everyone understands that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Some of these ideas have been taking form for a long time, but it's as though they're suddenly ready to burst onto the stage.
5 comments:
There is one term that best describes my feeling on this matter.
"Fix bayonets"
"...if people are losing their insurance we're really doing them a favor..."
Really?
I've not seen that one. Probably a good thing, too, cause I'd most likely have a few pieces of my mind to leave behind.
Oh, I'm seeing it everywhere! Certainly in comments, but David Axelrod is peddling it on TV, and many admin spokesmen are spouting it in print interviews. It was bad, bad insurance! You didn't understand how vulnerable you were! We're helping you out! Try HotAir links.
The L.A. Times article with the wonderful quotation "I didn't know I'd have to pay for It" has almost 2,700 comments now. About every few dozen comments someone tries to argue that they had to cancel the insurance because it was bad.
Yeah, my insurance was "bad", too. Coat a lot more and covered more than I would have liked, since our old WA state insurance commissioner decided to mandate what the insurance companies had to cover. So most of the companies pulled out of the state.
Now what I wanted to buy was very simple- straight catastrophic coverage, that would protect us from a devastating illness, but we would pay for ALL routine care and minor surgeries etc up to 10K.
Well, I couldn't buy that. Not allowed.
So now, after having the state government screw up the insurance market, we get to deal with a national screw up-
Our premiums are going from around 400 a month, to 1200 a month, with a 6K deductible and only a 60 percent coverage for hospital.So we will still be bankrupt if one of us gets really sick. So what we really have is Bad and Worse. Now of course I can voluntarily drop my income, so I can steal from others (get a subsidy)but I don't want to have to watch my work to stay below a certain output-
There have been a lot of government oversteps in my lifetime, but NEVER anything like this direct, personal attack on my income and my health.
On a NYT site, a woman argued, in a moment of clarity, that she had no use for traditional insurance because it served only to protect the assets of "rich people." As she sees it, ordinary people never get any benefit, because by the time you get down to a tiny deductible, the premiums are out of sight, or if you get the premiums down, you never make your deductible. If you had big bills you'd just have to go bankrupt -- unless you're one of the bad people who have saved up enough to live on in retirement. And who wants to let them protect themselves? They're rich. We hate them.
The word is that HHS doesn't like the individual market, because it's "inefficient," whatever that means. I don't get what the alternative is. Should everyone be covered through an employer? Or on Medicare or Medicaid? What are they thinking, even from their own twisted viewpoint. If they were just saying I can't have a Yugo because only a Volvo is safe enough, I could understand that whether or not I agreed with it. But I'll be darned if I can understand what make I'm supposed to prefer now.
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