Obamacare California Exchange Rates: Not Higher, Mostly LOWER

This has been all over the progressive blogosphere in the last 24 hours:

On Thursday, California officials revealed insurance companies’ opening bids for the state’s Obamacare marketplace in 2014. The numbers are great for consumers — and terrible for right-wing fear mongering over the health law.

Covered California, the agency tasked with constructing and maintaining the Golden State’s insurance marketplace, announced in a press release that rates submitted by 13 insurers for the 2014 individual marketplace were far lower than initially expected, ranging from a stunning 29 percent below the current average premium for small business health plans to only two percent above them.

Huge markets like California and New York will be leading the way in quickly implementing Obamacare (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act), which will make it increasingly difficult for the reactionaries of the right to slow walk and otherwise gum up the works,  try as they might (and possibly succeed in the near term in their benighted red states).  Seeing actual numbers, as opposed to speculation and fear-mongering, might counter the "death-panels syndrome," wherein the right sets the tone and parameters of the discussion and leads the credulous media around by the nose.  A lot depends on honest brokers to spread the information (for example AARP,  Kaiser Family Foundation, etc.) because surely you won't be reading or hearing it in the news media.