Unfortunately for Michael Shear, things on the internet never go away and posterity will point at and mock him for his concern trolling. I understand the need to write something, anything, in what is an unproductive political era, but you can do so without making a buffoon out of yourself. The extremely temporary problems with the Healthcare.gov website are of no lasting import whatsoever. The only potential problem here is that it doesn’t get fixed quickly enough to avoid a deficit of healthy consumers and the rates are annoyingly high as a result. But even that would be fixed and forgotten within a couple of years.
Before long, the website will function exactly as it was intended to and people will get good, solid and affordable access to health care. And the only kind of stories worth writing about the political impact of ObamaCare are ones that look at what it will mean for millions of people to get their healthcare with the assistance of government subsidies, and what it will mean for a political party to oppose those subsidies or seek to diminish them.
the thing that kills me about all this whining about a website?
the disconnect…the utter and absolute disconnect from people who don’t have health insurance.
This is the country that has people who will stand out in the cold in November, for the promise of a $25 DVD PLAYER, and people think folks won’t have the patience of JOB to get HEALTH INSURANCE?
that a website will stop them?
The only people who think that are mofos who have never been without health insurance.
AND they pretend like the only way to enroll is through the website.
if they meant right..
at the end of everyone of those fucking stories, they’d go….
YOU KNOW, YOU CAN ALWAYS CALL THIS NUMBER TO ENROLL IN OBAMACARE.
Good point. And yes, if you’re going to complain about the website, you always have to ask yourself: in comparison to what? No matter how chaotic the system is right now, the whole point of it is to try to bring some order to the chaos that has been our health insurance industry for decades now. Should we go back to that?
People who use the technical problems as an excuse to throw out the whole ACA are arguing a complete non sequitur: The rollout of the website has been rocky, so people with preexisting conditions should not be able to buy health insurance.
Concerning trolling, thy name is The New York Times. Much the same, on foreign policy (“Criticism of United States’ Mideast Policy Increasingly Comes From Allies”), came out a few days ago from the one and only Michael Gordon:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/world/middleeast/kerry-reassures-israel-on-iran-but-divisions-rema
in.html
Ezra Klein has been doing the same kind of concern trolling. That rather surprised me, but I guess he had to write something and he wanted the approval of the MSM.
Booman, you are correct that this will disappear as an issue very soon. Want to know how soon? Take the issue of the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis as a comparison, notice how quickly that disappeared from the news (even though it’s a real problem representing the decline of America quite unlike a few problems in integrating a set of computer programs) and cut the time to about 1/3rd. It will last about a week past the time the Republicans find it is a political dry hole.
WHO would have thought..
As insane as I think the GOP was…
that they would DELIBERATELY HURT people in their OWN STATES by having GOP GOvernors refusing to expand Medicaid.
And, refusing to set up the state exchanges.
WHO actually thought that the feds would ultimately be responsible for setting up HALF THE EXCHANGES because the GOP Governors refused to do so?
WHO actually thought these mofos were that fucking evil?
I had a low opinion of them, but even I was shocked at the extent of their fucking evil in condemning their working poor to lives without health insurance.
Always remember:
the feds asked for 5 billion for the rollout…got on billion.
do you not remember Sebelius being forced to go to the healthcare industry for money for the rollout?
do you not read the reports from the states where these GOP evil asses are doing everything they can to put up roadblocks for those folks who have chosen to go out there and help people sign up for Obamacare?
but, I guess it’s too much for the MSM to do their JOB and include all these not so small facts in their ‘ oh no, Obamacare is a disaster because of website glitches’ stories.
All excellent points.
As for the first question, after reading a little of the history of Reconstruction and Redemption after the Civil War, I’m one of those people who’s not really surprised “that they would deliberately hurt people in their own states” by refusing to expand Medicaid.
Their ancestors did the same thing with public education in the 19th and most of the 20th century.
The freaking out over the website is growing more amusing by the day. People can sign up right now, just the way they did many years ago with Social Security and Medicare, by calling the number and filling out some forms via regular mail.
It’ll be fixed by december in the 34 obstructing states and works just fine in all the others. Yeah, I wish they’d done a better job with it, but ultimately, people can get what they need.
The bigger problem is a lack of advertising and awareness in those 34 states.
What I think is hysterical is every time a concern troll worries about Healthcare.gov they mention Healthcare.gov and in the process the dull witted American Public hears the web address Healthcare.gov a million times so Healthcare.gov gets drilled into their subconsciousness.
Was it Napoleon who said something like “don’t interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake”?
Oh yeah I forgot to mention: Healthcare.gov
It was? It must have been pretty damn implicit, because I never noticed. I would say the philosophy he’s always presented is that government can do good things for you, if given a chance, but he never claimed it’s automatic.
That’s hilarious. So either nothing goes remotely wrong with the government ever, or Obama’s a failure and a liar.
To be fair, we have no idea if the problems are “extremely temporary” and in fact, what does that even mean?
It’s possible they’ll go along fixing things then find someone screwed up something very very deep into the system and fixing it will require an overhaul of EVERYTHING else. Or they’re not actually fixing things instead just patching and establishing work-arounds until it collapses under its own weight.
Or you know, it just slowly gets fixed.
Perspective is a devil.
I’m visiting relatives in Texas, and found myself biting my tongue the other day as one of my dearest expressed outrage that her premiums had risen 12% due to the ACA. This is not coming from a person for whom such a relatively modest rate increase could remotely be described as a hardship. I’m reminded of when the Papa John’s guy bemoaned the notion that he might have to add $0.15 to each pizza to cover the cost of health care for his employees.
For those who don’t see the pre-ACA status quo as a problem, and who are categorically opposed to making even the slightest accommodation to help the abstract other who might be experiencing problems with health care and insurance — what can you say?
The news is going to continue to hammer on the web site issues because yuppie poutrage sells. Broke and sick and uninsured? Tough titties. The internet is slow? DEFCON TWO!
We need to keep hitting back with stories about what truly matters, e.g. parents keeping their kids in insurance and people who previously could not get insurance due to pre-existing conditions. We need to keep reminding people about lifetime caps and the kind of incredibly invasive questionnaires that you used to need to fill out in order to get covered — so that, down the road, the insurer could have their lawyers find reasons to deny your claims.
If we can hold the course, the ACA becomes the status quo, and at that point, we might even enlist the help of some of these knuckleheads in making it better. Remember that even while repudiating the ACA, and without any remotely plausible explanation of how he was going to make it work, Mitt Romney included guaranteed issue in his 2012 healthcare platform. People won’t give that up once they understand what they’ve got.
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