Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Obamacarefreude

Now that the shutdown distraction is behind them, the right is finally directing their full attention to the fucked up roll out of the Affordable Care Act.

Which is all fair game, as far as I am concerned. It is nice to finally get some rightwing criticism of the law that has some substance behind it. (Most, if not all, of the criticism I saw prior to October 1st, demonstrated that a lot of wingnuts had no idea what the ACA is or how it worked).

With one exception. I don't think it's fair game for governors and members of State legislatures who refused to set up a state exchange under the ACA to point to the healthcare.gov woes and say that ObamaCare isn't working. In most of the jurisdictions where states are running their own exchange, things are working much better. State-based exchanges have had some problems (Hawaii, for example, used the same contractor to set up its state-based exchange as the federal government did and so it was plagued with some of the same problems. The site relaunched on October 15th and now seems to be working) But, overall, it looks like the ACA is operating in places where the states set up an exchange. So if you happen to be one of the people who decided not to create an exchange in your state and to force people to rely on the federal exchange, the federal exchange's current woes do not justify your decision.