Daily Meme: Another Week, Another News Cycle Dominated by Obamacare

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  • The slow, messy rollout of the Affordable Care Act's biggest ticket items is D.C.'s latest shiny thing. You can expect new stories about the state of health care-and the state of Healthcare.gov's website-from now until at least the first few weeks of the new year, when enrollees start to get insurance.
  • Some of the stories have useful information, like this chart-packed one by Sarah Kliff, which she puts together every day.
  • Much more often, you're going to see griping about Obamacare, or stories about the many unanticipated problems with the health-care exchange's debut...
  • ... which Jeffrey Zients, the man in charge of fixing Healthcare.gov, assures will be mostly fixed by the time November ends. We'll see...
  • And anyway, as Larry Summers points out, "it is indefensible to refuse to appropriate money to carry out a programme and then attack it on the grounds that it is being under-resourced." (He's talking about you, Republicans)
  • All this doomsday reporting and analyzing misses out on a few important details about the things Obamacare has already gotten right.
  • Like the fact that up to 7 million Americans could qualify for free insurance under these new exchanges.
  • Or that many more Americans will get insurance for the first time thanks to the Medicare expansion than will see their plans canceled.
  • Or that some political actors are trying to actively hurt Obamacare's chances of success by making it harder for people to help interested parties sign up.
  • And, it might be useful to remember how bad health insurance used to be.

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