If you haven’t read it yet, check out this story about a man who survived for three days in an air pocket in a sunken ship on the Atlantic seafloor just off the coast of Nigeria. He was discovered and rescued by a diving team that was there simply to recover bodies. There’s a extraordinary moment when one of the divers sees the hand of what he assumes is a corpse, grabs it and then feels it grab back. It’s a classic feel good story. The video is amazing. But reading the piece, marveling at this guy’s amazing luck, I kept thinking of the countless people who have been in some similar position and met the totally predictable, close to inevitable conclusion of the story – with plenty of time to grasp the sheer hopelessness of their predicament.
Who knows whether Healthcare.gov is “fixed”. That’s a semantic and polemical point. But it seems to be working dramatically better than it did in the initial weeks of the Obamacare roll out. If that’s true, does this open a new chapter in the roll out of health care reform and the politics surrounding it? Or will the press narrative stay the same and we’re still basically on the hard, brutal slog we’ve been on for two months. We’re discussing that question now at The Hive (sub. req.).
From TPM Reader SF …
I’ve an Obamacare story – a happy one! – I thought I’d share with you, because I suspect I’m representative of a demographic that’s not getting a lot of ink.
I’ve bought health insurance on the individual market for a decade. Since 2007, when my youngest was born, I’ve had the same BC&BS policy to cover the whole family (me, wife, two kids, no major health issues). It’s roughly equivalent to a silver plan, albeit a fairly tarnished silver—no maternity, for instance—and it’s more than doubled in the past six years, from $684 a month in ’07 to $1,457 now. Our plan is grandfathered, so we could keep it, a fact BC&BS reminded us of in a cheery mailer. If we did nothing, we’d be rolled over onJanuary 1 with a new premium of $1,549 a month for our same silvery plan.
Maybe a small hint here that Speaker Boehner wants to make a real move on immigration reform.