Terrific: 58 Percent of the Uninsured Haven't Even Looked at the Exchanges Yet
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Morning Jolt December 19, 2013 Terrific: 58 Percent of the Uninsured Haven't Even Looked at the Exchanges Yet Before we begin this morning's buffet table of bad news for Obamacare, a quick note on the typically bad-faith accusation from the Left that we're somehow enjoying all the problems stemming from the implementation of this law. From the beginning, Obamacare fans inside and outside of government insisted that they were right, that we were wrong, and that we were motivated by all sorts of malicious and callous motives. They insisted our skepticism was fueled by ignorance and outdated ideology. Our warnings and dire predictions were dismissed as sour-grapes negativity and pessimism. Most of the ideas from the right -- medical malpractice reform, interstate sales of insurance -- were ignored or dismissed. We said you couldn't require insurance companies to cover a lot of new expenses -- i.e., pre-existing conditions -- without driving up costs, and that higher costs inevitably would drive up premiums. Obama's promise that his plan would lower premiums by $2,500 per year for families was always industrial-strength snake-oil, and yet somehow we were the bad guys for saying it couldn't possibly happen, short of covering the costs from the discovery of the Leprechaun's pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Now it is exceedingly clear that one-sixth of the nation's economy is being fouled up beyond recognition by a convoluted, complicated, poorly-planned Rube Goldberg of a law that has been implemented by hacks whose overestimation of their own abilities is on an astronomical level. So we're not enjoying any of the problems from Obamacare, but spare us the insistence that we not take any satisfaction in seeing our assessment of the world, the limits of policy, the capabilities of government, and the possibility of grandiose, utopian promises reaffirmed, verified, underlined, highlighted, and footnoted in high-definition, day after day. Anyway, today's roundup: Most of the uninsured haven't even looked at the exchanges yet: "Ten percent of uninsured Americans in the poll say they have applied for insurance under the exchanges. Thirty-two percent say they have looked up information about the exchanges but have not applied; 58 percent have not looked up information about health insurance exchanges." Oh, and 59 percent of the uninsured think getting health insurance would "hurt them financially." Remember, all of this grief and aggravation is driven by the aim to get the uninsured to buy insurance. Just how many Americans are losing insurance? "In the poll, 13 percent of insured Americans say they've received a notice that their health insurance plan is being cancelled or changed because it does not meet the minimum coverage requirements under the 2010 health care law." Better hope the server change goes smoothly: "Some technical experts are perplexed at the U.S. government's plan to switch web hosts for its new health insurance portal, HealthCare.gov, in the midst of an expected last-minute rush to beat a March 31 enrollment deadline for 2014 coverage. Switching hosts is not in and of itself a huge risk if it is done carefully and with lots of preparation, according to technical experts interviewed by Reuters. It is the timing of the highly complex maneuver that is risky. If there are problems, the website could become sluggish or even unusable for anyone trying to enroll. The government is tempting fate, they said." Hey, come on. What are the odds of something going wrong with Healthcare.gov? Back to square one: "Illinois officials are e-mailing and calling some 30,000 people, advising them to start over on their health insurance applications. They say it's possible they were referred to Medicaid. Officials advise if the screener at the Get Covered Illinois website sends them back to healthcare.gov, they should create a new account with a different e-mail address and submit a new application." And enrollment in some states remains abysmal: "As of Wednesday, the New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange had spent at least $2.5 million on marketing and outreach campaigns to get people to buy health insurance. And as of Wednesday, 291 people had enrolled for coverage beginning Jan. 1 on NMHIX's small business exchange." A Prescient Symbol from the Dawn of the Obama Era Hey, remember this image from 2008?
Of course, that "O" looks an awful lot like a zero. And so the image, "Obama: Zero Sign of Progress" seems kind of fitting for the conclusion of year five of the Obama era, huh? Why We Should Retire the 'Drinking the Kool-Aid' Metaphor I presume you read yesterday's Campaign Spot post on John Podesta's claim that today's Republican party is "a cult worthy of Jonestown." I pointed out the irony that Jim Jones was an increasingly influential figure in California Democratic party politics back in the mid-1970s, openly embraced by the likes of Jerry Brown, Walter Mondale, and Dianne Feinstein. While Jones's capacity for mass murder was not yet known, he and his followers' dangerous, cultish behavior was obvious. I mentioned on Twitter that it is probably a good idea to retire Jonestown and "drinking the Kool-Aid" metaphors. Someone accused me of succumbing to political correctness, so lest I be misunderstood, I'm not calling for any Orwellian regulation of speech. Just self-measured and self-imposed taste and good judgment. I've probably used the "drinking the Kool-Aid" metaphor myself in the past. Today when we use it, we mean somebody's excessively credulous, willing to believe impossible things out of runaway loyalty to a person or cause. But the story of Jim Jones and his cult is such a nightmare of manipulative, cruel evil that it's way out of proportion to compare it to any garden-variety political enthusiasm or naïve belief in something proven false. You're probably drinking your morning coffee, so I'll refrain from delving into this horror too deeply. This documentary will fill in all the details, including video of Jones's men shooting at Congressman Leo Ryan and the media, as well as audio of Jones persuading women to poison their own children with cyanide. Ultimately Jones's mad vision led to 909 dead, a combination of suicide and homicide, roughly 300 of them children. Nobody in our politics is as bad as Jim Jones. Evaluating Homeland Over in the Corner Tuesday, Jonah assessed the recently-completed third season of Showtime's Homeland -- brilliantly tense at its best, like 24 without the ticking clock, and maddening at other points, with slow episodes, extraneous plotlines, and plot twists that jump from shocking to just shockingly implausible. (SPOILERS AHEAD) Jonah concludes, "I liked the show better when the politics were more recognizably leftwing and the artistry was better" but I would disagree that the show was ever a clear-cut argument for the left. Like 24 (which two of the Homeland creators, Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa worked on), the show explores the moral compromises we make in wartime, where we draw the lines, and at what point we become too similar to our foes. The show's opening premise was always a nightmare beyond the traditional realms of Right and Left -- what if a returning American prisoner of war was secretly a sleeper agent for al-Qaeda? (The show's portrayal of POW David Brody was never a broad-brush, Vietnam-era demonization of veterans but meant to be a particularly insidious individual case of Islamist torture and manipulation.) The opening challenge to the protagonist, CIA officer Carrie, was that she suspected/knew that Brody had been "turned" during his captivity but no one would believe her and irrefutable proof was endlessly elusive. The problem with that dynamite premise is that it eventually has to get resolved. Brody's loyalty to Islamist terrorists -- or at least deep-rooted desire to kill high-level American policymakers and military leaders –--was established early, and the CIA found irrefutable proof early in season two. Yet after an episode or two of capture and interrogation, the CIA believed they had "turned" Brody back, and used him to spy on the terror network of Abu Nazir. Brody the quasi-good guy was one of the show's first missteps, and one of the first giant leaps beyond credulity. (We'll get back to this point.) Sure, the CIA, military and administration depicted in Homeland often included closed-minded bureaucrats, cravenly ambitious officials, and lawmakers a little too comfortable with drone strikes and collateral damage. In a past Jolt, I griped that "the CIA, as seen in Homeland, probably ought to be disbanded, or at least completely reorganized; time and again, its leadership goes well beyond moral gray areas and dives deep into the charcoal realm." But Homeland never wavered in depicting Islamists as bloodthirsty lunatics hell-bent on blowing people up -- relentlessly evil, like their real-life counterparts. But the good-guy Brody opened the door to the Carrie-Brody romance. At the end of season two, Saul tells her flatly, "you are the smartest and dumbest [bleeping] person I've ever met," clearly speaking for a large chunk of the audience. Brody is the villain. Period. He's not an anti-hero, he's not just a morally-conflicted man, and while he's manipulated, he's not brainwashed. He blames high-level U.S. officials for a drone strike that killed children. At any point he could have exposed that war crime, but his first-season choice is to put on a suicide vest and try to detonate himself at a gathering of senior officials. (The trigger won't work.) Later Brody becomes a U.S. congressman -- another leap of credulity -- and he still doesn't investigate the drone strike. Put me down as someone who didn't mind the Brody family drama over the past seasons simply because we so rarely see depictions of military families on television at all. Sure, the Brody family's problems are really extreme, but the difficulty of returning to "normal" life after the extreme stress of a war zone is undoubtedly a subject worth exploring on the screen. Also, Morena Baccarin really can't do much wrong. Carrie is one of the most spectacularly frustrating protagonists in recent years. Claire Danes's portrayal of bipolar disorder is often gripping; her emotional unpredictability means every scene could end in disaster. This also makes it hard for the audience to "buy in" to her emotionally. Say, what year is it in the Homeland show? The opening credits feature Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama speaking, over footage and references to real-life terror attacks: Lockerbie, the U.S.S. Cole, 9/11. The first season includes a reference to the bin Laden mission being recent, and mentions that Brody was captured in Iraq in 2003 and has been held in captivity for eight years. The show premiered in 2011, so it seems that we're watching events from the "present day." But in the first two seasons, we see a vice president (presumably to Obama) who is the antithesis of goofy Joe Biden; this veep is a ruthless, ultra-hawkish former CIA director. It seems like this vice president's own presidential campaign is imminent, so it suggests we're in the near-future, say, 2015. (Also note that at one point, a female secretary of state is assassinated.) ADDENDA: Charlie Crist is lying: "Crist said Rubio endorsed Obamacare for his family. He did sign up for insurance on the Washington marketplace, but we think calling that an endorsement is too strong. Rubio certainly doesn't support Obamacare, and has pushed for its repeal. He's signed up through the marketplace simply to abide by the law. We rate this claim Mostly False." What do you have to do to get a "totally false"? To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com
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