Since October 1, when the government shutdown began, the media have run dozens upon dozens of stories about victims of the shutdown. Over the same period of time, the media have run virtually no stories about businesses suffering thanks to Obamacare, low-income people victimized by the new Obamacare tax, and economic chaos thanks to the impact of Obamacare. That’s particularly ridiculous given that with the furloughed federal workers soon to be back at their desks and paid for their furloughed time, the number of people seriously hurt by the government shutdown is minute, as opposed to the widespread damage from Obamacare.
The Washington Post was a key offender in its bias. Between October 1 and October 16, the Washington Post website published over 220 stories both from its own writers and the wires focusing on the supposedly horrible effects of the government shutdown. Most obviously, the Post ran a story declaring, simply, “Government shutdown generates stories of misery around the country.” But when it came to the implementation of Obamacare, though the Post ran more than 80 stories, many of them on failures of the Obamacare website, it apparently ran a grand total of 3 that focused mainly on the individuals and small businesses victimized by Obamacare itself.
The three articles openly criticizing Obamacare by focusing on victims included one about a veterinarian paying more for equipment thanks to the medical device tax, one about a local utility saying that coverage would be dropped, and one quoting a “Rush Limbaugh fan.” That was it.
There were a few occasional pieces pointing out structural flaws in Obamacare (generally the call from the Post was to rectify those flaws by extending more federal dollars), but those were few and far between. There were several op-eds against Obamacare, but the Post ran more pieces about the potential glories of Obamacare: “The myth about job-killing Obamacare,” “Obamacare saved my family from financial ruin,” a piece about a person happy to sit for hours at the failed Obamacare website to purchase insurance, young people looking forward to the exchanges, and op-eds proclaiming that the American people are dying for Obamacare.
The forty or so articles about the Obamacare rollout were generally negative – that is, except for the fact that the rollout was largely faulty, according to multiple articles in the Post, thanks to overdemand, and once fixed, buying Obamacare would be “pretty easy!” And, hey, in the end, “Google will make you immortal (and Obamacare will pay for it),” the Post reported. As for small business concerns, those were based on myths.
The Post was not nearly as sanguine about the shutdown. The Post made sure to cover that alleged misery in gory detail. There were dozens of stories lamenting the fate of furloughed federal workers. They came in all shapes and sizes, including stories about
how to keep federal workers engaged once they get back on the job;
how federal workers should dress while looking for other jobs;
a local NASA drama club was keeping furloughed workers entertained by participating in a production of Steven Sondheim’s Into the Woods (this topic drew a video and a writeup);
furloughed employees searching for sherry and soap on Google, as well as local happy hours;
furloughed workers attending free knitting classes to pass the time;
furloughed workers being tempted to use their federally-issued BlackBerrys;
furloughed workers attending comedy shows;
a furlough café.
The most amusing piece was certainly one from spouses of federal workers asking for the government to take them back to get them out of the house (“Take them back – please!”).
I picked this up about Obamacare from one of the links on the website;
Quote:
The president’s rather pitiful Obamacare defense address on Monday was just more evidence of the degree of panic sweeping through his administration. Their deepest fear: that the young and healthy are going to turn away from the flawed exchanges, driving the system into the dreaded “death spiral.”
Friday, the National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg posted a must-read piece on “Obamacare’s Ticking Clock” that articulates the real Obamacare narrative the mainstream media desperately wants to ignore. The story is not really the “third world” website per se, it’s how that hot mess impacts enrollment numbers and demographics. The longer the site stumbles, the more pressure to delay the individual mandate, Obamacare’s only means of survival.
As Goldberg argues, the clock is ticking on the Obamacare “tech surge” as pressure mounts from both sides for an individual mandate delay:
Still, the barely holding conventional wisdom on the right and left is that the website will get fixed eventually, the glitches will be de-glitched, and one day we’ll all look back and laugh at the fuss. That’s possible. But with every passing day it’s less likely. And if more Democrats join the movement to delay the individual mandate (Republican senator Marco Rubio has already drafted legislation to do exactly that), the whole thing could start to unravel almost overnight.
Obama’s Rose Garden sales pitch emphasized that Obamacare is more than Healthcare.gov. Right, but as Goldberg points out, the ramifications of the website’s failures impact more than just public perception of the program’s online interface. Goldberg’s analogy: the website rollout is like “watching a rival football team face-plant on the way out of the locker room.”
Obamacare will have to forfeit the game if it cannot amass enough young and healthy customers, most of whom are not willing to put up the “North Korean-level customer service” of the program. The only way to “attract” these young, healthy customers is by coercion, i.e., the individual mandate. For this reason, Goldberg argues the insurance companies “cannot survive without the individual mandate”:
That’s because insurance companies cannot survive Obamacare without the individual mandate. Under the law, they must offer insurance to anyone who needs it — often at an artificially low price at that. The only way they can make a profit is if the government upholds its promise to get millions of young, healthy people to sign up for more expensive insurance than they need. Take away the mandate — i.e., the penalty — and you make that virtually impossible. If the government tells insurance companies they still have to provide insurance to bad risks, it will be like the government telling Apple it has to sell iPhones at a loss. The insurance companies will sue. And as Dan McLaughlin of The Federalist notes, their lawyers will invoke the Obama administration’s arguments before the Supreme Court that the mandate was inseparable from the “must-issue” requirements under the law.
With the clocking ticking on the “glitch” fix, the individual mandate is increasingly in danger of delay. And with every potential young and healthy enrollee the hapless Healthcare.gov fails to attract, the Republicans who called for delay look “just a little bit more reasonable.”
Linear Mode
