Reuters reports that, in response to the Obama administration’s “public education campaign on healthcare reform, Republicans and their allies are mobilizing a counter-offensive including town hall meetings, protests and media promotions to dissuade uninsured Americans from obtaining health coverage.” Beutler fumes:
It’s bad enough to just not care all that much if the U.S. has a large uninsured population. But if there’s an excuse for encouraging people who have the means to remain uninsured, I can’t fathom it.
It almost goes without saying that this effort is being undertaken to keep younger, healthier people out of the exchanges, and send the individual insurance market into an adverse-selection “death spiral.” That would ruin the system for people who want the help Obamacare offers them. And so the campaign effectively amounts to asking people to continue putting their well-being and livelihoods at risk for the good of the cause of keeping health care for sick people unaffordable.
Drum can hardly believe that “they’re literally going to be encouraging people not to buy health insurance”:
What’s next? A campaign to get people to skip wearing seat belts? To skip using baby seats in cars? To skip vaccinations for their kids? It’s times like this that words fail those of us with a few remaining vestiges of human decency.
Cohn notes how unusual this kind of obstruction is:
If you’re among those people who agrees about the inherent malevolence of Obamacare, then this might all seem very reasonable. (Hey, they burned draft cards to protest the Vietnam War—and Obamacare is just as awful!) But if you don’t see things that way, you might be wondering if this is the way opposition parties and movements typically act when a law they don’t like is about to take effect. The answer is no.
And Sarah Kliff thinks that Republicans may unintentionally be helping Obamacare succeed:
Republicans have set Obamacare expectations so incredibly low that, if Godzilla doesn’t march in on Oct. 1 and gobble up our health insurance coverage and legions of IRS agents fail to microchip the masses, that could plausibly look like a success.
Earlier Dish on Republicans’ attempts to sabotage Obamacare here.
The Dish 