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Foes of Obamacare are excitedly citing a rash of new stories claiming untold Americans are “losing” their insurance, as CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell puts it.

But the GOP outrage about Americans supposedly “losing” coverage is largely just more of the same old misdirection. It’s a subset of a larger Republican refusal to have an actual debate about the law’s tradeoffs — one in which the law’s benefits for millions of Americans are also reckoned with in a serious way.

On the substance of this argument, Igor Volsky has a good response, noting that these Americans aren’t “losing” coverage at all:

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Individuals receiving cancellation notices will have a choice of enrolling in subsidized insurance in the exchanges and will probably end up paying less for more coverage. Those who don’t qualify for the tax credits will be paying more for comprehensive insurance that will be there for them when they become sick (and could actually end up spending less for health care since more services will now be covered). They will also no longer be part of a system in which the young and healthy are offered cheap insurance premiums because their sick neighbors are priced out or denied coverage. That, after all, is the whole point of reform. http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/10/28/2850061/wrong-story-obama-k
nowing-health-care-policy-cancelled/]

But many foes of Obamacare refuse to grapple seriously with the basic tradeoff at the core of the law. For a fair look at whether this tradeoff is “worth it,” see http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115372/how-obamacare-changing-insur
ance-premiums-and-coverage

While it is too soon to assess the true dimensions of this tradeoff, the debate over it is entirely legitimate. It is the policy debate we should be having. But some Obamacare foes don’t even acknowledge that the law involves a tradeoff at all. Only the law’s downsides, and not the millions who stand to gain — many old, poor or sick — must be acknowledged.

As the Post’s Glenn Kessler argued in debunking some of Ted Cruz’s rhetoric about “millions” losing from Obamacare: “The full impact of the health-care law will not be known for years, and there are bound to be winners and losers in any major change in social policy…he does not allow at all for the possibility that millions of people are benefiting from the law — and that quite likely the number of winners from the law is larger than the losers.” ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/18/ted-cru
zs-claims-on-obamacare-focus-on-losers-not-winners/)

All of this flows from a basic difference between the two parties. Most Dems believe the Federal government has a legitimate role in expanding health coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans — through more government oversight over the health system, and, yes, government spending that is to some degree (though the extent is not yet clear) redistributive. Most Republicans don’t believe this. Conservatives such as Charles Cooke forthrightly defend that position. But Congressional Republicans are trying to obscure the true nature of this difference, by pushing GOP reform ideas that are advertised as a federal solution for the “vulnerable,” even though they almost certainly would cover a very small fraction of those who will benefit from Obamacare ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/09/18/the-conser
vative-alternative-to-obamacare-isnt-an-alternative-to-obamacare/). The core difference here can’t be papered over, and indeed it’s revealed anew in the refusal of many to acknowledge the law’s benefits for millions.

Meanwhile, because the only acceptable position on the law for Republicans is to demand full repeal, they spend too little time prioritizing which parts of the law they’d want to change and won’t engage in bipartisan fixes to it that GOP-aligned constituencies want ( http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/us/politics/polarized-congress-thwar
ts-changes-to-health-care-law.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=1&;).

It’s puzzling. If public opinion is on the side of Republicans on Obamacare, why can’t we have a normal debate about the actual tradeoffs at the core of the law and about fundamental questions as to the proper federal role in solving health care problems afflicting tens of millions of Americans? http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/10/29/morning-pl
um-why-normal-debate-about-obamacare-is-impossible/?hpid=z2

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Originally posted by Niki2:
Individuals receiving cancellation notices will have a choice of enrolling in subsidized insurance in the exchanges and will probably end up paying less for more coverage.

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Originally posted by Geezer:
Unfortunately, those folks can't enroll in exchanges because the healthcare.org site is still not working very well. When the administration's spokespeople still refuse to tell Congress how many folks have actually been able to sign up, it's not too encouraging.

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Originally posted by AURaptor:
It's impossible because Obama and those in favor of this bill lied.

With intent, knowingly lied, to the American people.

To deny that is to deny the very basis of what constitutes a lie.

And they're STILL lying.


Can anyone name a single private run company, like Amazon or ebay, which would still be " open for business " if their web site were so fraked up as ObamaCare's ?

It's beyond laughable to believe any corporate site would spend a billion dollars on a system which is so utterly and catastrophically flawed, and still be open for business. But because this is govt, it's " glitches ", which won't be fixed for another month ( yeah, bullshit on that ) we're suppose to act as if this is no big deal ?

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