It’s a big week for Obamacare, the as-politically-charged-as-ever health reform law passed three years ago, and the Internet is now just beginning to bubble with the kind of material that will bring the whole network to a confusing rolling boil by Tuesday when the law’s signature insurance exchanges are set to launch.
This piece by the Washington Post aims to humanize the complicated story in digestible chunks and it’s generating arguments. The comments piling up below it offer a typical cross section of the angry, confused, exasperated, relieved masses.
Colorado Republican Congressman Cory Gardner has been railing against the law since before it passed. Two days ago, he wrote an op-ed for the Colorado Springs Gazette about how he never accepted federal employee health benefits when he went to Washington in 2010 and now his family’s private insurance plan has been cancelled because of “the myriad new regulations, requirements and mandates of the president’s health care law.” Gardner doesn’t offer any details about the provider or the plan nor any specifics on why it got canceled. He wrote that, if he decides to stick with his provider, he’ll have to pay more. He doesn’t say whether he can now find a better plan at a lower rate somewhere else or if he’s even tried. Righty blogger Michelle Malkin reported yesterday that Gardner is carrying the policy cancelation letter around with him as a prop.
A recent post by the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative offers more light and less heat about the coming exchanges that also explains why private plans like Gardner’s are being canceled. In short, the plans don’t live up to the new consumer standards; they may either be gouging consumers or discriminating against them or both, for example. The piece contains links for people looking for more information to weigh whether the exchanges will work for them, including a link to Colorado’s exchanges website.
Conservative politics site TownHall is gleefully rounding up reports of exchange set up delays and confusion, including this dispatch from Colorado.
And then there are dispatches, like this one, from the deep reaches of the fever swamp.
If you plan to travel to the Internet next week, kiss your loved ones goodbye and pack a bright light, penicillin and a machete.
The Republican party is a sad spectacle. This video is a prime example. Given the content are we to assume the GOP considers the voters illiterates? Sadly many are and will swallow the mixed message tying guns to health care. In my opinion the sponsors of this ludicrous bit of propaganda haven’t much respect for their supporters making the assumption they are that stupid to buy this slop.