A lot riding on the Obamacare announcement that President Obama will be making at the White House at 11:30 ET. It’s not clear what “fixes” to Obamacare the administration can make to satisfy the current panic among Democrats in Congress that will at the same time not undermine the financial structure of health care reform. It’s a terrible position to be in, and it’s a direct consequence of the failures of … a website.
When you’re the Mayor of the biggest city in Canada and you admit you smoked crack – or you think you smoked crack but you can’t exactly remember since you were so hammered when you smoked it – it’s really hard to top yourself. But Mayor Rob Ford of Toronto just keeps bringing it. New police reports of a St. Patrick’s Day bash in 2012 includes hookers, vodka, oxy, cocaine and well … just join me after the jump for more …
This chart really tells the story of the Obamacare numbers that were announced today – states that set up exchanges are cruising along; in states that didn’t, enrollment was at a virtual standstill in October. Really a must-read. Check it out.
Sweet mappage of the not-so-sweet new Obamacare enrollment figures. Take a look.
The news is out: just under 27,000 people signed up for health care through Healthcare.gov in the first month. That’s a really, really low number. What’s equally striking to me is the other number: just under 80,000 additional sign-ups came through the state exchanges, for a total of just over 106,000.
It’s not just a hobbled website. Several things came together in October to seriously challenge and perhaps truly damage the roll out and perhaps even the future of Obamacare. The hobbled website created a backdrop of dysfunction and incompetence. The mass cancellations (which in many cases weren’t cancelations at all) provided a class of aggrieved victims. The President’s promise – which never really made sense given the nature of the program – tied it to the chief executive, with a moral, broken promise edge. Republicans have been trying to dismantle Obamacare for literally years. And they’re doing everything they can to fan the flames. But over the last few days Democrats (and not just Democrats from Red States) have been coming forward to support ‘fixes’ which would either seriously complicate the launch the Affordable Care Act or even kill it in its infancy. For Democrats and especially the President (who can kill any fix with his pen), it’s time for the big gut check, one that’s not only about 2014 but stretches back into the 1940s and has implications probably decades into the future.
When I first saw the latest Richard Cohen brouhaha sparked by this column, I thought he suffered from Chronic Racial Grandpa-ism (CRG), a late in life on-set condition with which many of us are probably familiar. The person in question probably has little if any real racial animus and may even believe in equality as far as it goes. But they are constantly falling into ways of talking about race – and not just talking but thinking about race – that just aren’t how people talk any more. A constant source of cringes and excuse-making for younger relatives.
At 72, Cohen is old enough to be afflicted. But I don’t think that’s really what’s going on with him. There’s something more ambivalent and pernicious.
Meet Joe Olivo. He’s part of a conservative business group that sued to try to stop Obamacare. Yet lots of news outlets keep portraying him as a regular ol’ business owner, including in stories about Obamacare, without mentioning the group.
Sarah Palin says she’s disturbed that many of Pope Francis’ pastoral pronouncements have “sounded kind of liberal.”
Sitting where I sit, “Obamacare” is a focus for me in two key ways – 1st, as the editor of TPM, in terms of our news coverage and my own opinion pieces and then 2nd, as the publisher and owner of TPM, as the purchaser of health insurance for more than twenty people in two jurisdictions. There are lots of people purchasing and paying for group health insurance plans. And there’s no shortage of people in the media analyzing, reporting and pontificating about Obamacare. But I think I’m part of a pretty small population of people doing both. So, since we’ve had a number of questions about it, I wanted to give a few details about what our own experience has been with Obamacare as a small business.