Sunday, November 24, 2013

The Truth Is Out There



This one made all the media, and was trumpeted on Fox "news" and RW radio like Gabriel was playing the horn. A lady from my state, who'd touted Obamacare and was featured by the WH, it turns out, didn't qualify for the rate relief she'd been told. Another lie, another bald-faced lie by the lying liar from Kenya. Well, as has been the case with a heck of a lot of the sad stories trotted out by the let-'em-diers, it turns out there's more to the story. A lot more: 

... Except there’s a key detail none of these media outlets mentioned. 
Which is: Sanford’s son was discovered to qualify for Medicaid coverage at a cost of just $30 a month. He has ADHD and, according to Sanford, it costs them $250 a month for prescription drugs alone. Which will now all be covered. 
It’s true the rest of her insurance won’t get a big discount, as she had first thought. “That mistake is totally on us,” said Bethany Frey of the Washington state health exchange. 
But a bronze-level policy for a 48-year-old woman making $49,000 can be had on the state exchange for $237 a month, and a silver-level policy for $313.
So here’s a family that was totally uninsured for 15 years because it had always cost at least $500 to $600 a month for skimpy policies to cover them both. And what they can get now is full coverage for $30 a month for the son and scantier coverage in the $250 to $300 a month range for the mom. 
How is that a horror story? Yet it prompted a live scandalcast in front of the White House by a national news network — which didn’t know, or maybe didn’t want to say, that due to the state health exchange the son now is getting essentially free health care...
The problems with the ACA are many. Some might even say expected, at the beginning of such a huge program. A program aimed -- and mostly successful at -- getting people previously unable to, enrolled in affordable health care. One might wonder: for every story (many of which have been found to be falsified; and in the case of Fox, deliberately so) of people priced out, how many thousands of unheralded successes are there? But where's the news in that?

It strikes me as little like, in reverse, how excited we get when a lone survivor of a building collapse is found, after hundreds died. "It's a miracle," we like to say.


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