Moneybox

Obamacare’s Going to Be Great

I’ve got a new column up about the White House’s plans for the rollout of the Obamacare exchanges and I wanted to once again take the opportunity to lay down a marker and say once again that Obamacare implementation is going to be a huge political success.

Again, that’s not to deny that there will be some problems. But you have to understand that the media, for non-ideological reasons, is just massively biased toward negativity about this kind of thing. You never read a newspaper article headlined “A Bunch of People Got Free Dental Care Today Because They Live In A State That Offers Dental Benefits Under Medicaid,” but if something goes wrong in a state’s Medicaid program, that warrants a story. That’s the nature of the news business. You add in the fact that Republicans have a vested interest in making hay about problems plus the fact that liberals have never been all that enthusiastic about the Affordable Care Act’s reliance on private insurers, and a lot of negative coverage is baked into the cake. But fundamentally a lot of this criticism comes in the form of comparing the reality of the ACA to an abstract idealized system rather than comparing it to the status quo.