WaPo - "The Squeaky-Wheel Problem in Obamacare Coverage" - Upper Class Rules!

[TomCADem]

I think it is funny that David Frum is the one that points this out as a weakness of Obamacare. That the primary beneficiaries are the middle class and those lower on the income spectrum. I thought that was a good thing.

The upper-middle-class self-employed people in the individual market can stir up a lot of dust, even if they represent a tiny fraction of the population.

Conservative writer David Frum points to something in a column today that I think explains a lot of the somewhat-overwrought coverage of the individual insurance market:

Talking Points Memo today offers a chart suggesting that the losers under Obamacare will number about 3 percent of the population. Why, that’s only … 9 million people. Nine million of the best educated, most affluent, and most vocal people in the country. How much trouble can they make? So really—it’s no story.

It's all well and good to argue that only a small fraction of Americans will see premium increases in the individual market, but most of those who are seeing them—and who also are subsidy-ineligible under Obamacare—are from the middle to upper-income part of the middle class. More than 40 percent of people in the individual market are there because they are self-employed or running a small business. They're entrepreneurial and independent-spirited by nature, and when they squeak, they make a lot of noise.

By contrast, I'll be shocked if we see nearly as much attention devoted to the personal stories of the tens of thousands of low-income people now getting insurance through Obamacare's Medicaid expansion. Instead, we get experts tut-tutting over whether the planned expansion that's intended to cover an additional 9 million near-poor people over the next year is going to be a burden on the states.

[gtar100]

1. The important thing (sic) is that the media is not talking about how the tea party shut down the

government costing us billions and putting a lot of people out of work. And they can minimize the coverage of welfare programs being cut even now. Instead we get wall to wall coverage of website issues (without talking about how the obstruction and meddling of republicans played a huge role in the problems in the first place) and the exceptions (as you so well laid out) being made the rule as if nothing else mattered.

It's all just sick, sick, sick. Tens of millions of people finally getting some form of coverage and that just isn't important to them. I for one do not hold a shred of respect for mainstream media and the more that people stop listening to a bunch of hucksters who would be just as happy to see us all dead, the better off we will be.

[Mass]

2. Oh no. You mean that poor people get some some help. This is the same party who cuts drastically

food stamps, so why am I not surprised.