GREG SARGENT WASHINGTON POST
HealthCare.gov just tweeted that more than 375,000 had visited the refurbished federal website as of noon today. White House press secretary Jay Carney confirmed the figure shortly after.
So demand still appears to be there, despite weeks of deservedly awful press about the website and the law, and weeks of Republican claims that the law is so disastrously flawed that it cannot be rescued.
Along those lines, Kevin Drum captures what matters most about the news of the moment in one half a sentence:
if you need to buy health coverage via healthcare.gov, you can do itThis really is the rub. Sure, there will be continued problems. Charles Ornstein personally had a terrible experience. Sarah Kliff found the site is still not working for everybody. And the snafus at the back end may persist, too.
But the big picture is that far more people who need health insurance — whether they were bumped from plans or whether they were previously uninsured — will now be mostly able to go online, do some shopping, and buy health insurance. Before, they couldn’t.
This isn’t as good a story as the website’s implosion was, and if the site continues to function as expected, it will mostly stop getting media coverage. The press will move on to the next Obamacare disaster story, should it materialize: The “keep your doctor” saga, coming soon via Republican press release directly to reporters’ inboxes.
But the current fix has mostly tamped down concerns among Democratic lawmakers, and barring some truly catastrophic change, they just aren’t going to abandon the law in any meaningful sense. Meanwhile, demand looks likely to continue, even as insurance companies redouble their efforts to entice people on to the exchanges, which means enrollment will continue piling up, too.
Will it be enough? It’s too soon to say. Republican lawmakers and their voters have been 100 percent certain for some time now that Obamacare has already collapsed, but for everyone else, the law’s long term prospects will turn mostly on what that enrollment looks like over time. And for that, we’ll just have to wait.
GREG SARGENT WASHINGTON POST
It’s widely accepted as an article of faith that Obamacare will be uniformly bad politics for Dems in 2014. After all, the rollout is a disaster and majorities disapprove of the law, so how could it possibly be any other way, right?
Here’s something that counter-programs that narrative a bit: Democrats are currently using a major pillar of the health law — the Medicaid expansion — as a weapon against Republican Governors in multiple 2014 races. Many of these Governors opted out of the expansion or have advanced their own replacement solutions, and many are facing serious challenges
In Florida, Democrat Charlie Crist has excoriated GOP Governor Rick Scott for dragging his feet on the Medicaid expansion, claiming a “million” Floridians “will not get health care” as a result. In Wisconsin, Democrat Mary Burke is campaigning on a pledge to reverse GOP Governor Scott Walker’s decision to turn down $119 million in federal money to expand Medicaid to more low-income Wisconsinites.
In Pennsylvania, multiple Dems looking to run for governor are attacking GOP Governor Tom Corbett for subbing in his own plan to expand Medicaid, arguing it’s a ploy to defuse the issue. In Maine, Dem Rep. Mike Michaud is attacking GOP Governor Paul LePage for refusing to opt in.
Some Dems running for governor in red states, such as South Carolina, may not embrace the Medicaid expansion debate as directly. But the fact that it’s emerging as an issue in some high profile races is a reminder that it’s still good politics for Dems to campaign on components of the Affordable Care Act that directly impact many of the constituents these GOP governors represent. Terry McAuliffe was just elected governor of purple Virginia partly on the Medicaid expansion.
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The larger story is that the Medicaid expansion is emerging as an early Obamacare success — a rare area where the law may already be putting Republicans on the defensive. A new report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services finds that over 1.4 million people in October were deemed eligible to enroll in Medicaid or CHIP. There was a far larger jump in applications where states are expanding Medicaid than where they aren’t — another sign Obamacare may benefit far more people in states where GOP governors are not trying to block the expansion.
SEAN SULLIVAN WASHINGTON POST
At the ballot box, President Obama has dominated the youth vote like no other candidate of his generation. Now, as he tries to shepherd his health-care law through a rocky rollout and make it work in the long run, the president is as reliant as ever on the young.
But this time, success is far less certain.