While more popular perceptions of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare!) may be slowly changing the political narrative, Paul Krugman writes that Republicans haven't given up -- not by a long shot -- in their attempt to reinvent it as a failure:
[We] can be fairly sure that Republican leaders know perfectly well that Obamacare has failed to fail. But the party faithful don’t. Like anyone who writes about these issues, I get vast amounts of mail from people who know, just know, that insurance premiums are skyrocketing, that far more people have lost insurance because of Obummercare than have gained it, that all the horror stories are real, and that anyone who says otherwise is just a liberal shill.
Beyond that, the constant harping on alleged failure works as innuendo even if each individual claim collapses in the face of evidence. A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a majority of Americans know that more than eight million people enrolled in health exchanges; but it also found a majority of respondents believing that this was below expectations, and that the law was working badly. (our emphasis)Left unsaid is the truth that there's another culprit at work helping Republicans and their plutocrat backers =cough= Koch brothers =cough= catapult their lies into the public arena. You guessed it: the "mainstream media." If the media spent as much time debunking-- if not deflecting in the first place -- those Republican lies, we might have a more informed public that would see that the law is succeeding despite a bungled launch, and that millions of Americans now and in the future will benefit from it. But as long as we have "the Chuck Todd maxim" operating, we shouldn't expect enlightenment from these Republican-wired stenographers.
Oh, by the way, Obamacare is working and is here to stay.
