We've seen this before and we'll see it again -- unless we move to another, saner and more civilized nation. Yup, I'm thinking about it, are you?
We're in the middle of "piling on" season with the feeling that it will never end. Jonathan Chait says it'll go away. It always does.
The most common fallacy of journalism, and one of the most common fallacies of the human brain in general, is the assumption that whatever is happening at the moment will continue to happen forever. That has been the implicit assumption of the hyperventilating coverage of the miserable Obamacare rollout. That fallacy is the explicit premise of one such story today, which asserts, “The lesson of the last six weeks is that when it comes to the Obamacare rollout, if it can go wrong, it probably will.” Fittingly, that piece appears in Politico, a publication for whom the overmagnification of recent trends is its essential credo. ...Chait,DailyIntel
He's right about Politico. Politico has one or two journalists of merit but is mostly just another digital tabloid. Was anyone else startled backaways when Politico turned up on CSpan? CSpan lost a bunch of creds and still hasn't gained them back.
Jonathan Chait reminds us that real life is quite different from medialand. For instance -- and as many of us have seen -- the Obamacare website was never impossible and is now working pretty damn well and life goes on.
The website is kind of working already. Lost in the Keep Your Plan imbroglio, it appears that healthcare.gov has already reached a point of functionality. It can currently handle 20–25,000 simultaneous users. That may or may not qualify as a full Hanukkah Miracle fixed website by the end of the month, but it’s probably enough, at the very least, to let the law muddle through.
All sorts of things will happen to Obamacare in the next few months. At least some of those things will be bad, because any large enough enterprise, public or private, has bad things happen. One thing that can be predicted is that more and more people will start signing up for Obamacare between now and the end of March, which means the constituency for the law will steadily grow. There will still be a constituency against the law, and possibly future failures will enlarge it, too.
But at some point, having state exchanges where people buy private insurance, with rules preventing abusive practices, will simply be part of the backdrop of health insurance. Take, say, the police. Police departments across the country are constantly beating up innocent people and letting criminals run wild. There will never be an end to stories of police corruption and incompetence. But most people simply take stories like that as reasons to try to make the policy work better, not as arguments that having a police department is a conceptual failure. ...Chait,DailyIntel
Some out there are just into chicken-littling. Others are just permanently angry. My theory is that a multitude of righties hated George W. Bush but felt obliged to defend him, turning their unexploded anger on Obama -- where it has exploded daily, weekly, monthly since the first inauguration.
If we could, we'd send them all to stand in the corner wearing dunce caps. There aren't enough corners and caps. We're stuck their anger, resentment, and destructive behaviors until they grow out of it. If they grow out of it.
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"A number of states that use their own systems, including California, are on track to hit enrollment targets for 2014 because of a sharp increase in November... The growing enrollment in those states is a rare bit of good news for backers of the Affordable Care Act and suggests that the serious problems with the law's rollout may not be fatal, despite critics' renewed calls for repeal."...PoliticalWire/LATimes
