Enter
well. So will most of the pundits
currently batting this meme back
and forth. They’ll all be fine. Really, super fine, actually. They’re
going to have terrific, largely worry-free lives.
And I’m not even sure that the
Affordable Care Act is necessarily destined to be some terrifying
loss — though everything basically
hinges on this website getting fixed
in a very timely fashion. Should it
get up to patch and start delivering customers to the exchanges in
big numbers, then the Obamacare
rollout could end up mattering just
as much as that first debate between Obama and Mitt Romney —
the one that, you know, ended the
Obama presidency. Regardless,
I’m pretty sure that when all is
said and done, no one will be rebuilding homes in the Lower Ninth
Ward because the health insurance
market got disrupted.
If everything falls to ruin, however, then sure — the Affordable
Care Act’s failings will shadow
Obama for the rest of his life, manifesting mainly in the way everyone
will talk about the next president’s
failings as his or her “Obamacare.”
There has to be a great story
out there about what life is like
for normal human Americans who
LOOKING FORWARD
IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON
11.24-12.01.13
aren’t affluent political celebrities or who don’t enjoy a luxurious sinecure in Beltway punditry.
But the saddest part of all of this is
that the Affordable Care Act’s woes
have created only a brief interest
in the woes of ordinary Americans, and just how terrifying it can
The promulgation of an
‘Obama’s Katrina’ metaphor
firmly underscores the basic
lack of real stakes involved
for all of the people having
that conversation.”
be for one’s life to depend on the
kindness of insurance providers in
the individual market. Right now,
if you can proffer a letter attesting to the fact that you’ve lost your
health insurance, chances are you
can finally get a reporter who had
never previously evinced interest
in the matter on the phone.
It wasn’t always this way. A
July 2009 study conducted by
Families USA found that between
January 2008 and December
2010, in the teeth of the economic downturn, over 44,000
Americans were receiving notice
that they’d be losing their health