March 12, 2014

I'm not sure what positive news would ever make the talking heads over at Faux "news" finally quit beating up on the health care law that their side used to embrace -- or did before the Kenyan, Socialist, Communist, tyrant, mom-jeans-wearing, Marxist President Obama decided to sign what used to be considered Bob Dole, the Heritage Foundation and/or Mitt Romney's Republican health care plan into law.

Now it's evil incarnate and must be attacked at every turn. Fox's Megyn Kelly went after Ezekiel Emanuel this Tuesday evening, and he did a pretty good job of holding his own against Kelly's right wing talking points.

As he explained to her in the segment above, there's a ton of misinformation out there about the health care law and it not meeting the goal of having 40 percent of those signing up for the ACA who are young doesn't necessarily mean there's going to be a problem with the risk pools.

Here's more on just that from Think Progress: With One Month Left To Sign Up For Health Coverage, Obamacare Enrollments Surpass 4.2 Million Mark:

Just one day after Gallup released a new survey finding that the U.S. uninsurance rate has hit a second consecutive five-year low, the Obama administration announced that more than 4.2 million Americans enrolled in private health plans through the Affordable Care Act’s state and federal marketplaces during the first five months of the health law’s open enrollment season.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released revised figures last month projecting that approximately six million Americans are expected to sign up for private Obamacare plans by March 31. The latest numbers released today indicate that the administration will at least come close to hitting that mark. [...]

In an encouraging sign for the stability of Obamacare’s marketplaces, the White House reported that enrollment by younger Americans aged 18 to 34 remained stable between January and February at 27 percent of all signups — a three percentage point rise over the average for the first three months.

That number is also expected to spike in the final month as the White House, nonprofit organizations, and insurance companies throughout the country engage in an all-out push to sign up as many uninsured Americans as possible — particularly younger and healthier people. This push involves some creative efforts to reach young people. On Tuesday morning, comedy site Funny or Die released an episode of Zach Galifianakis’ web show Between Two Ferns featuring an interview with President Barack Obama in which the president hawked his signature health law to the young and uninsured. Administration officials announced that Funny or Die’s website had become the number one source of referrals to Healthcare.gov by Tuesday afternoon and directed 19,000 people to the site.

Critics are likely to point out that the CBO and other independent organizations have projected that approximately 40 percent of ACA enrollees will have to be relatively young in order for the marketplaces to function effectively — but that’s not exactly the case. Insurance actuaries told the Commonwealth Fund last month that health status is a far more important metric for determining how expensive and stable Obamacare’s risk pools will be, and researchers from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) have pointed out that several built-in provisions of the health law will keep premium increases to a minimum — and possibly even prevent them entirely — in 2015.

I'm pretty sure Kelly, her producers and Roger Ailes weren't too thrilled with this headline either: The Obamacare Recovery Continues: Now Up To 4.2 Million Sign-Ups:

The Obamacare recovery continued in February, according to new numbers released by the Obama administration Tuesday: 942,000 Americans enrolled in private coverage last month, bringing the total through five months to 4.2 million.

Sign-ups are still lagging behind the original 7 million enrollments projected for the entire six-month open enrollment period that ends March 31, but the law has made up significant ground. And if enrollments have been spiking in March as White House officials and health policy experts have long predicted, Obamacare could come closer to meeting that 7 million projection, made by the Congressional Budget Office before the enrollment period began in October, than most would have thought possible after HealthCare.gov's disastrous launch.

Imagine the right wing freakout we'd be putting up with now if we'd actually managed to get single payer passed.

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