Huffington Magazine Issue 74 | Page 12

Enter will not come out ahead, that’s a shame, but no law in the history of America makes everyone better off,” would have been a better thing for President Barack Obama to say than, “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” But 1,000 “unnamed political strategists” will tell me that my approach is naive and would ensure that no law ever gets passed. And maybe being honest would keep a lot of laws from getting passed, but maybe that’s the cardinal virtue of honesty. But even if the above chart offers some comfort in the knowledge that the vast majority of Americans aren’t receiving shocking letters in the mail from their insurance providers, this nevertheless demonstrates how bad it was that Obamacare had a functioning hashtag before Healthcare.gov was a functioning website. See that 3 percent in the chart marked “no real consequence?” Well, without a way to actually discover there are no real consequences, how are those people supposed to know that? There are, perhaps, a portion of that population who can avail themselves of a functioning state exchange website, but the potential is there that the number of people who currently think of themselves as “losers” is LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST HUFFINGTON 11.10.13 double the size of the actual “potential loser” population. That’s bad, because what we’re going to endure between now and the hoped-for end-of-November launch of a functioning Healthcare. gov website is a month of getting nibbled to death by anecdotes. As Dave Weigel points out, this sliver of actual and perceived losers still constitutes a population of “millions of Americans” that Maybe being honest would keep a lot of laws from getting passed, but maybe that’s the cardinal virtue of honesty.” “can talk to the media about how horrid the experience is.” That means, for Obamacare supporters, “a long trench warfare campaign of fact-checking and, occasionally, apologizing.” He points to this “debunking” of an “Obamacare horror story” over at the Los Angeles Times, which, while successful, took a lot of time and energy. And remember the old adage, “A lie can be halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.” Which isn’t to say any of these