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