Catastrophic Coverage
By Baumann, Nick | |
Proquest LLC |
THE MEDIA OVERREACT TO OBAMACARE'S GLITCHES
The president wants you to call your mom because
America's pundits lost hold of their senses. Ignoring the fact that numerous provisions of the ACA were already in place and broadly popular (allowing children to stay on their parents' insurance until age twenty-six, forbidding discrimination against children with pre-existing conditions, narrowing the
Some of this panic was born of disappointment. There's no doubt that the Obama administration and its contractors badly bungled the ACA rollout. The president himself had called a successful rollout his top priority, reportedly telling advisers that "nothing else matters" and "we've got to do it right." Yet the
But important as it is to call out the administration's fail- ures, its also important to see the November panic for what is was: silly. There's no excuse for comparing a health-insurance program to a hurricane that killed nearly two-thousand Americans, or a war that killed even more. Nor was it wise to draw conclusions about the future of a massive government program from its first few weeks. As many commentators have noted,
In addition to being ahistorical, prognostications of doom for the Affordable Care Act also ignored the fact that
Fortunately for the New Deal, Twitter didn't broadcast every farmer's sad encounter with the Agriculture Adjustment Act. But the culture of modern
Actually, it's far from clear that this "magnifying" effect has undermined the public's support for liberalism. In fact, Gallup's polling on American ideological identity suggests the opposite trend: in 2013, 23 percent of Americans selfidentified as liberals, the highest percentage since polling on the subject began in 1992.
So while the culture of
Breaking out of these ideological fetters is no small feat, and if there's any evidence to suggest that Twitter and the twenty-four-hour news cycle make it easier, Foer doesn't present it. If anything, the segmentation of media into leftwing and right-wing oudets means that ever more Americans are hearing news that reinforces what they already believe. Yet Foer, extrapolating from the questionable claim that the incessant reporting of Beltway scandals actually affects Americans' opinions, concludes that "the earliest days of a policy's existence have even greater significance"-and that as a consequence, liberals in the future will have to be more or less perfect. The next president's challenge, he writes,
will be to ensure that her biggest legislative achievements-curbing carbon emissions perhaps, or expanding the Affordable Care Act-are impeccably implemented with the precision that her ancestors celebrated. She must contend with the new expectations that technology has set, with all of those devices that arrive in our hands seemingly glitch-free. That's what the Obama administration somehow failed to grasp and what liberalism requires if it ever wants to replicate its greatest victories.
This is bananas. The next president's ancestors did not, in fact, implement their government programs with "precision," unless you count the ruthless efficiency with which they denied black people and women the protection of the state. We have simply forgotten the mistakes made by our liberal ancestors along the way, or at least Foer has. And forgive me if I fail to worship at the shrine of Blessed Steve Jobs.
What the doomsayers of November couldn't foresee was that more Americans would sign up for Obamacare in the first two days of December than in all of October. And hundreds of thousands more signed up during the first two weeks of January, pushing enrollment even higher. America's top health insurers, meanwhile, have told the press and their shareholders that they don't expect the law's problems to hurt their 2014 profits-an indication that they expect enough enrollees (and the right kind) to make the law self-sustaining.
Government is messy because people are messy. The liberal project says that despite all that, some problems are so big and so pressing that they require collective action. The century-old liberal goal of health care for all isn't about winning elections or scoring political points. It's about making sure that sick people can get the care they need, regardless of their ability to pay. There will be setbacks along the way, but they don't mark the end of the effort-just a signal to try again, to push harder, to make different mistakes. Eventually, we'll get it right.
Copyright: | (c) 2014 Commonweal Foundation |
Wordcount: | 1683 |
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