Thursday Open Thread [9.26.13]

Brian Beutler today at Salon:

What happened over the past 48 hours is a direct consequence of Republicans making sport out of misleading the public, and particularly conservatives, about the threat Obamacare poses to the country. It created an incentive for publicity-hungry members to stage more and more elaborate, but ultimately symbolic, anti-Obamacare performances

If Republicans really worried that Obamacare is as dangerous as they’ve been claiming for years — if they truly believed it will sap the middle class of ambition and bankrupt the country — then many more of them would have joined Cruz over the past 24 hours. At the very least, they wouldn’t have blown him off and attacked his motives and trashed him anonymously in the press.

But the deceptive nature of their opposition campaign created an opening for a false savior like Cruz to outperform them.

Republicans are annoyed with Cruz for plenty of reasons — he’s arrogant, he’s lying to primary voters about the limits of GOP power, he’s inching Congress toward a government shutdown most of the party wants to avoid. But a big subtext here is that he’s exposed the simple message that once united the party as a sham. If Obamacare is as perilous as the party claims, why wait until the next election to try and derail it? By swooping in like he did, knowing he couldn’t deliver, he actually exposed both charades — his own and his GOP antagonists’ — and left ACA intact.

So Republicans are liars. This is not news. What is news is that they might, finally, at long last, be paying a price for it.

Brian Beutler yesterday at Salon:

Republicans are setting themselves up to tumble into a discontinuity of their own creation. The surge of anti-Obamacare legislative antics has created a feedback loop between Republicans and GOP base voters, where each vote increases the right’s insistence on defeating the law, which in turn creates more pressure on Republicans to take radical steps to defund or delay or repeal it. But unless they plan on trying to take away people’s insurance in an election year, they’ll have to dial back their extreme anti-Obamacare procedural tactics at the moment that the right’s insistence on keeping up the fight is most pitched.

It might look right now like Obamacare will dominate the politics of 2014, but I think that’s a premature judgment. At least some Republicans will feel pressure to change their views about the law — or at least their view that it should be repealed — next year. Certainly after primary season is behind them. That’ll be an awkward turn for them to take.

Especially when the law… YES THE LAW… is already working. Yes, Republicans, it is working. Well. It is not a trainwreck. The Department of Health and Human Services released a report yesterday that showing that the “average national premium for an individual policy will be $328 in 2014, before including any of the tax credits that will be available to low- and middle-income Americans to help them purchase coverage.”

Across the 48 states for which data were available, the unsubsidized monthly premiums could be as low as $70 for an individual and as high as $1,200 for a moderate plan for a family of four.

Those damn red states, confederate traitors that they are, get a deal in this:

One of the report’s most striking findings is that states like Texas and Florida, where the law has faced fierce opposition despite high rates of uninsured residents, will see rates at or below the national average.

“There is no clear political pattern to these premiums,” said Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan research organization. …“Some conservative, anti-Obamacare states have lower-than-average premiums, and some pro-Obamacare states have higher-than-average premiums.”

The news gets better. The premiums are cheaper than the Congressional Budget Office expected. That means the whole law is better than expected.

HHS reports that in about 94 percent of cases the CBO overestimated how high premiums would be.

Specific premiums are going to vary quite widely from state to state and according to your age and the size of your family. But nationwide health care spending has grown more slowly than people had expected over the past couple of years, and in most states insurance companies have offered fairly aggressive bids to participate in the exchanges. Obviously this could all change 18 months from now when people are actually in the plans, but for now it looks like Obamacare will be cheaper for families and taxpayers than was thought at the time Congress voted on it.