My Monday column begins like so:
Since 2009, the opponents of healthcare reform have successfully circulated a lengthy roster of narratives and agitprop against the policy and, eventually, the Affordable Care Act itself. You know the list. “Death panels,” “government takeover,” “failed law,” “socialized medicine,” and so forth.
The latest is that the ACA is “Obama’s Katrina,” followed by the inevitable “Obama’s Watergate” on Fox News Sunday over the weekend. Regarding the latter, I thought Benghazi, the IRS scandal, Fast and Furious and, I don’t know, Solyndra were supposed to be Obama’s Watergate(s). Sorry, folks. Repeatedly comparing every presidential scandal to Watergate will never change the reality of Nixon’s dreadful, malevolent legacy.
The hilariously preposterous idea that the Affordable Care Act is “Obama’s [Fill In Notorious Presidential Scandal Here]” is based almost entirely on one thing: the president’s pledge that folks who like their health insurance plan can keep it. This is usually followed by a series of overblown, oftentimes dishonest stories about people receiving cancellation notices from their insurance providers allegedly due to the minimum requirements of the ACA. In some cases, this is, indeed, true. In other cases, such as cancellation notices from UnitedHealthcare as the stated result of the corporation simply abandoning the non-group insurance market.
Either way, yes, we can connect the ACA to many of the cancellations. Toss into the mix a temporarily problematic website, along with misleadingly reported enrollment numbers and there it is — Obama’s Katrina — because those two (or “three”) glitches in the system are somehow, in some universe, the equivalent of Katrina and the botched response to, you know, the most devastating hurricane in American history.
But let’s confront these cancellations head on, since it’s supposed to be, according to the perpetually insufferable Dana Milbank, “game over” for the Obama administration… [CONTINUE READING]