The Dish

Jonathan Cohn defends Obamacare’s disappointing initial sign-up numbers by looking at Massachusetts’s experience:

If you want to get a real sense of enrollment patterns among people choosing to shop and buy plans, it’s better to exclude the people getting free care. (In the Massachusetts plan, that would mean people who ended up enrolling in what were called “Type I” and, with some exceptions, “Type IIA” plans.) Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who was an architect of the Massachusetts health reforms, has provided me with those numbers. The results? Of the 36,167 people who eventually enrolled in premium-charging plans from Commonwealth Care, 123 signed up in the first month. That’s right—one hundred and twenty-three, or about 0.3 percent. Over the first two months, the number was a bit larger—2,289. But that’s still just 6.3 percent.

The analogy to Obamacare is far from perfect, in that Commonwealth Care didn’t include wealthier people who didn’t qualify for subsidies. (In the Massachusetts scheme, they essentially had a separate exchange—and enrollment there began half a year later.) Also, the Massachusetts open enrollment period was twice as long. So it’s reasonable to expect that, with a fully functional website, early enrollment in Obamacare private plans would be higher than those numbers above suggest. But the general point stands. Very few people sign up for insurance in the first few months. Most wait until much later in the game.

Given Healthcare.gov’s back-end problems, the low number of sign-ups might be better than the alternative. Kliff introduces us to the 834 form:

It is a technical, back-end reporting tool that consumers never see. It is meant to be read by computers, not human beings. It’s the form that tells the insurer’s system who you are and what you need. And it might be the new health-care law’s biggest problem. … Some in the industry believe HealthCare.gov’s traffic problems have been a blessing-in-disguise for the program: If applicants were being able to sign up easily but the 834 forms were coming in with this many errors the results could be disastrous.

Robert Laszewski explains why the 834 forms must be fixed before other parts of the website:

I almost have the sense that HealthCare.gov is in de facto shutdown. Here’s why: Government has to fix the back end before the front end. The demand here is real. I don’t think anyone can dispute that millions of people want to sign up. So if they fix the front end for consumers and thousands of people or hundreds of thousands of people being enrolled before they fix the back end, we’ll have a catastrophic mess.

When insurers are getting 10 or 20 or 50 enrollments a day they can clean the errors up manually. But they can’t do that for thousands of enrollments a day. They have to automate at some point. So I think the Obama administration doesn’t want to cross the red line to shut the system down, but I think this is effectively a shutdown in which they don’t say they’ve shut it down but it basically is shut down.

Late yesterday, the administration announced a six-week individual mandate delay. Originally, even though open enrollment lasts through the end of March, individuals would have needed to buy health insurance by February 15th in order avoid a penalty. Sarah Kliff reported the news:

They are allowing anyone who purchases coverage during open enrollment (up through March 31) to not face a tax penalty for those three months they spent uncovered. This is only true for people who buy coverage through the marketplace.

How much this change had to do with HealthCare.gov’s technical problems isn’t totally clear. On the one hand, it certainly helps alleviate some of the time pressures on the administration if it can give shoppers six additional weeks to purchase coverage. On the other, it’s easy to see this change getting made in any situation. It’s confusing to have two separate deadlines, one when the individual mandate kicks in and another when shopping ends. Either way, now those two dates are the same. The mandate kicks in and open enrollment ends for exchange shoppers on March 31.

Chait bets that “the two deadlines for enrollment and avoiding a penalty, probably would have happened even if HealthCare.gov wasn’t a glitchy mess.” Drum isn’t so sure:

I’m a little surprised the administration is taking this action so soon. After all, if the Obamacare website is up and running by mid-November, that should still leave plenty of time for everyone to meet the old deadline. This suggests that the White House has already concluded that fixing the online application process is going to be a long slog.

Meanwhile, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin will submit legislation to delay the individual mandate by a full year. Chait unpacks the politics of this move:

It’s a pure political maneuver by vulnerable Democrats to insulate themselves from an unpopular national story. And as political theater, it’s a fairly clever maneuver. President Obama could simply veto a legislative delay if it passes. It would have been harder for him to veto a bill delaying the individual mandate if it were tied to reopening the federal government or lifting the debt ceiling. The individual mandate lets red state Democrats engage in some relatively harmless distancing rituals.

Pierce piles on:

If Manchin wants to delay the mandate because he doesn’t like it, he should say so, and he should admit [that] he doesn’t like the law, period, because, otherwise, he’s saying he likes the law, but not the parts that make it work, and that would be a really dumb thing to argue.

Yesterday, friend-of-the-Dish Maria Popova’s wonderfully curated website and newsletter, Brain Pickings, turned seven. There’s really nothing quite like it on the web – a labor of love that consistently turns up the most enriching literary and cultural artifacts, from the daily routines of famous writers to the 100 ideas that changed graphic design. When I look around the web for sites that really do value intelligent content over page-view whoring and advertizing-disguised-as-editorial, Maria’s singular blog perches head and shoulders above the rest.

I’m in awe of her intellectual range and boundless capacity for reading, reading, reading. She is a walking rebuttal to the idea that new media cannot sustain and further deep reading and writing. I see that as the great challenge editorially online – finding a way to harness the energy and curiosity of the web to lead away from ADD listicles and GIFs and toward more long-form reading, complicated thought and intelligent, informed conversation.

Here’s how Maria describes the remarkable growth of her venture:

On October 23, 2006, I sent a short email to a few friends at work — one of the four jobs I held while paying my way through college — with the subject line “brain pickings,” announcing my intention to start a weekly digest featuring five stimulating things to learn about each week, from a breakthrough in neuroscience to a timeless piece of poetry. “It should take no more than 4 minutes (hopefully much less) to read,” I promised.

This was the inception of Brain Pickings. At the time, I neither planned nor anticipated that this tiny experiment would one day be included in the Library of Congress digital archive of “materials of historical importance” and the few friends would become millions of monthly readers all over the world, ranging from the Dutch high school student who wrote to me this morning to my 77-year-old grandmother in Bulgaria to the person in Wisconsin who mailed me strudel last week. (Thank you!)

Later in the post, she offers seven lessons she’s learned from seven years of writing. One of them? “Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind”:

Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.

Maria gets both the perils and the promise of web journalism. She seems instinctively to understand what I was forced to learn by daily blogging for a decade and more: a mind is a wonderful thing to change.

Enten – always a downer – suspects that Gallup’s latest poll is an outlier:

Of the three other polls taken this year, only Pew’s found a majority who believe use of marijuana should be made legal.

Pew’s 52% was far less than Gallup’s 58%, and it, at least, followed the more linear trend of support building slowly over a few years that one might expect. The other two polls conducted in 2013 actually found that more people than not wanted recreational use of marijuana to stay illegal. A survey conducted by Fox News had the number in favor of legalization only at 46%, with 49% opposed. And a Public Religion Research Institute* survey matched the Fox News poll, with 45% in favor of marijuana legalization and 49% opposed

But:

That said, it seems to me that we’re likely heading towards a society in which marijuana will be legal. All pollsters have support for marijuana legalization jumping by about 20 points over the past 20 years. A few more polls that look like the ones from Gallup and Pew will convince me that a majority favor marijuana legalization now.

Just kidding about the downer part. He’s right to focus on all the polls, and not just one, and to see the deeper long-term shifts as the real news here.

Say what? Catholics please explain this to @thebrodyfile . Evangelicals are NOT kosher with this http://t.co/ELFfyRXCpE

— David Brody (@TheBrodyFile) September 12, 2013

The invaluable McKay Coppins – that rare political reporter who understands people of faith – homes in on another aspect of the phenomenon I noted yesterday: the impact of Pope Francis on the evangelical religious right. They’re not happy:

Bryan Fischer, a senior analyst at the American Family Association and devout Christian, said he was “disappointed and alarmed at some of the things the pope said” — a sentiment shared by many of the protestant culture warriors on America’s religious right. “It raises questions in our mind because the Catholic Church has always been a faithful shoulder-to-shoulder ally to social conservatives in the fight to protect unborn human life” and the sanctity of marriage, Fischer said. “We simply have questions of whether we’ll be able to count on the Catholic Church to be comrades-in-arms to continue to fight these battles.”

Fischer is way out there, of course, a near-pathological opponent of homosexual civil equality. But Coppins finds some nervousness among more careful spokespeople like Russell Moore of the Southern Baptists and Tony Perkins. Beneath their statements you can see a clear fissure developing along the ancient Catholic-Protestant fault-line, especially as it relates to politics. Francis is blunt on that:

I say that politics is the most important of the civil activities and has its own field of action, which is not that of religion. Political institutions are secular by definition and operate in independent spheres.

That re-statement of Christianity – as opposed to Christianism – along with Francis’ reframing of evangelization – “Proselytism is nonsense” – could almost be designed to infuriate Protestant Christianists. McKay finds a large fish in a small barrel:

Away from the gaggle of reporters, Tracy Pyland, a born again Christian and Maryland mother of five who came to the conference with her husband and two youngest children, was less diplomatic when asked about the pope’s recent comments. “That’s infuriating. That man needs to read his Bible,” she said.

She hastened to add, “I don’t mean any disrespect, but that man garners a lot respect and he should earn that respect. He should not have done that… He’s not doing the job he was given, which is to represent Christ in a positive light.”

For Christianist Protestants, Francis has not cast the positive light on Christianity the way, er, Bryan Fischer and Tony Perkins and Brian Brown have. That’s not a slight disagreement with most American Catholics. It’s a chasm of difference.

Update from a reader:

I’m very glad you have singled out my fellow Mormon McKay Coppins as a very smart political reporter with lots to say concerning faith and people of faith.  I’ve been a fan of his since he began to work at Buzzfeed – Ben Smith certainly knew what he was doing when he hired him from the Washington Times.

I’m sure Ben knew that Mr Coppins’ shared Mormon heritage would be a valuable asset on the Romney campaign trail, helping to explain, debunk or affirm Romney’s beliefs by someone who really knows his Mormon theology. He was also invaluable in deciphering Mormonism’s distinct (and at times quirky) culture, and that was just as important in my opinion. And his journalism seemed to stay very much in the center of the facts, he did it with a sensitivity to his own faith, as well as those of other Republicans in the race. How much of this perfect meshing of reporter and  was part of the Ben Smith/Buzzfeed plan and how much of it was serendipity I don’t know, but it really was the most consistently solid reporting on the Romney campaign that I read.

I wondered how he would fair after the election without a prominent Mormon to have to explain to a still wary nation, but I shouldn’t have. He’s been excellent since then as well, and has become a standard in my rotation.

I would like to think that part of his success speaking to and about people of faith has something to do with his Mormon upbringing (hell, he’s named after Mormon prophet David O. McKay, for crying out loud) and I want to recognize that there’s a strain of Mormon youth that are very much in the same mold as McKay, one that’s willing to talk up an often criticized biography of the Prophet Joseph Smith and to encourage other Mormons to be open to receiving criticism of their faith while searching diligently for truth, serving their fellow man and embracing the real stories of Mormons of the past and the new stores of today.

The fact that he looks like Truman Capote is a bonus.