My must read of the day is "Delusions of Failure," by Paul Krugman in the New York Times:
The Republican response to the State of the Union was delivered by Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican representative from Washington — and it was remarkable for its lack of content. A bit of uplifting personal biography, a check list of good things her party wants to happen with no hint of how it plans to make them happen. […]
Everyone knows about the disastrous rollout, but that was months ago. Since then, health reform has been steadily making up lost ground. At this point enrollments in the health exchanges are only about a million below Congressional Budget Office projections, and rising faster than projected. So a best guess is that by the time 2014 enrollment closes on March 31, there will be more than six million Americans signed up through the exchanges, versus seven million projected. Sign-ups might even meet the projection.
Maybe this law will pull off a major save in the next two months. Maybe, despite only enrolling 3 million in the first four months, the administration will enroll 4 million in two months to reach their original enrollment prediction.
Maybe they will get 40 percent of enrollees, in each state, to be healthy and between the ages of 18 and 34.
But even if those things were to happen, the fact still remains that this is not the law we were promised. The version of Obamacare sold to the public has already failed. It failed when we learned that premiums on the individual insurance market would increase by an average of 41 percent. It failed when millions of people realized that they would not be able to keep their health insurance plans, as the president promised.
Krugman may like to imagine the possibility of a death spiral is no more, but the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that 40 percent of enrollees need to be young invincibles in order to keep premiums from spiking.
From October to January, though, 24 percent of enrollees were between the ages of 18 and 34. That’s too low.
"The truth," Krugman writes, "is that the campaign against Obamacare relies on misleading stories at best, and often on outright deceit." He should know. His articles rely on wishful thinking and political spin.