Obamacare has gone from bad to worse, according to the right, with the most recent stats out today showing a huge increase in insurance coverage even as costs have gone down quite dramatically. Jonathan Chait has some fun at the expense of one libertarian who has continued to predict disaster even as he has been forced to admit that each outcome has shown the Affordable Care Act is working.
Chait writes:
We have gone from learning that the law has failed to cover anybody to learning it would cover a couple million to learning it would cover a few million to learning that it has probably insured fewer than 20 million people halfway through year one. The message of every individual dispatch is a confident prediction of the hated enemy's demise, yet the terms described in each, taken together, tell the story of retreat. The enemy’s invasion fleet has been destroyed; its huge losses on the field of battle have left it on the brink of surrender; the enemy soldiers will be slaughtered by our brave civilian defenders as they attempt to enter the capital; the resistance will triumph! ...DailyIntel
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On the other hand, they are probably expecting an immigration win. Paul Waldman writes:
The crisis along the border is tailor made for Republicans. It makes their base hopping mad, it juices their campaign fundraising, and anytime the government is unable to address a problem it makes Obama look bad. Why on earth would Republicans want to do anything to change any of this?
You might say that’s a cynical view, but so far we don’t have much reason to think it’s incorrect.My guess is that Republicans are going to go along with a highway trust fund fix, but not with an immigration fix. The reason is that if the news is blanketed with stories about transportation projects shutting down and construction workers losing their jobs, it’s going to be impossible for them to say it’s Obama’s fault, when they could have just appropriated the money. On the other hand, because the border crisis is more complicated in both its causes and potential solutions, they can keep blaming further chaos on the President. So that’s what they’re likely to do. ...Waldman,WaPo
