BY GREG SARGENT: Morning Plum: Insurance industry bets on Obamacare. GOP bets on failure.

[DonViejo]

I’ve expected this for some time, and here it is: The Wall Street Journal reports that insurance companies are set to unleash hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising to entice potential customers on to the exchanges created by Obamacare. As the Journal puts it:

Insurers … are capitalizing on an unprecedented opportunity in a shifting health-care market. Some seven million Americans are expected to buy health coverage on the new consumer exchanges, where people can compare insurance plans side by side.

All of this was merely put on hold by the failure of the federal website, and now that it’s largely functional, these plans can proceed. All this is a reminder of just how much of a stake the industry has in the law’s success, and how much it is willing to spend to try to make that happen.

What’s striking is that this comes even as the absolute certainty among Republicans that the law cannot do anything other than fail spectacularly — indeed, that this has already happened — has only hardened. The New York Times reports that a whole batch of Republicans who were unseated in 2012 are running again for Congress explicitly because they believe Obamacare’s failure has given them an opening — and that they have replaced their previous focus on other issues with a single minded focus on the law.

:::snip:::

full article
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/12/16/morning-plum-insurance-industry-bets-on-obamacare-gop-bets-on-failure/

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Flawed as it is

(and Migod, is it flawed!), the ACA will give Americans a small taste of what could be, and watching the Republicans falling off the cliff will be much more fun than watching lemmings, because the poor little lemmings are pretty harmless.