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Thursday, April 23, 2015

Moving the goal posts on ACA success UPDATED

Right. So the the same day that I posted about the substantial fall in the uninsured rate for adults that we have seen since Obamacare went into effect, a conservative writes at the Wall Street Journal making exactly the same arguments that Matt Yglesias had refuted. Cliff Asness writes in the WSJ:
That more people would be insured was never in dispute. If you mandate that people buy something, penalize them if they don’t and give it away to some, more people will end up with it. The proper response to this is: Duh.
So, as I said, Yglesias had already refuted this, giving a number of examples of conservatives who predicted there would be no reduction in the number of uninsured Americans. Today, Paul Krugman takes us to Jonathan Chait's response to Asness, where of course he piles on more examples of conservatives predicting a failure to improve the uninsured rate. Then he goes further. Asness wrote that a critical issue was "how many people covered by ObamaCare were previously uninsured." You can probably guess Chait's answer: "Well, that’s why you measure the net number of uninsured people, not just the gross expansion of coverage under Obamacare." Which leads us back to the chart showing the substantial fall in the uninsured rate that was in my last post (and Yglesias', Krugman's and no doubt many more besides).

The latest round is that yesterday Asness responded to Chait. Here is where the goal post move comes in:
In contrast the rise in coverage is heralded by a myriad of Obamacare supporters as one of two major pieces of proof the law is working. But, how can something we knew before the fact be proof of anything?
Did you catch that? If we predict that something good will happen as a result of a new law, and that good thing happens, it doesn't count as proof that the law was good. This is silly. We didn't actually know the insurance rate would fall, but we had economic models that told us it would. So not only is the fall evidence that the law is working, it's evidence that the models were right!

Somebody wake these people up.

UPDATE: @HaroldPollack points me to a new J.D. Power survey finding that people who signed up for insurance on the exchanges were more satisfied (696 out of 1000) than people with non-exchange plans, usually through employers (679 out of 1000). People re-enrolling on the exchanges scored even higher, with a score of 744 for people who re-enrolled on the Exchanges. Private plans offering multiple options were able to reach the 696 average for Exchange enrolees, which means that companies offering one insurance option had to be doing substantially worse than 679. Not surprisingly, new enrolees for 2015 were a large 55 points more satisfied than 2014 enrolees, who of course went through the disastrous rollout of healthcare.gov.  So people like their subsidies and they like their actual insurance policies, on average. Maybe that's why Republican Senators are getting antsy that there will be hell to pay if the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.