Over the Next Two Years ObamaCare Is Going to Succeed Where Local Politicians in Office Want It to Succeed, and Is Likely to Fail Where Local Politicians in Office Want It to Fail

This means a roughly $60 billion direct federal transfer away from Red States over the next two years, and roughly $200 billion in lower economic activity in Red States–call it a negative of 4%-point-years of GDP, and of 2%-point-years of excess Red State unemployment.

Interesting times…

And last weekend three Democratic governors–all of whom should be mentioned much more often by substance-oriented reporters as future presidential possibilities than the standard senators whom lazy reporters focus on–weighed in:

Jay Inslee, Steve Beshear and Dannel P. Malloy: How we got Obamacare to work:

In our states–Washington, Kentucky and Connecticut–the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” is working. Tens of thousands of our residents have enrolled in affordable health-care coverage. Many of them could not get insurance before the law was enacted. People keep asking us why our states have been successful. Here’s a hint: It’s not about our Web sites. Sure, having functioning Web sites for our health-care exchanges makes the job of meeting the enormous demand for affordable coverage much easier, but each of our state Web sites has had its share of technical glitches. As we have demonstrated on a near-daily basis, Web sites can continually be improved to meet consumers’ needs.

The Affordable Care Act has been successful in our states because our political and community leaders grasped the importance of expanding health-care coverage and have avoided the temptation to use health-care reform as a political football. In Washington, the legislature authorized Medicaid expansion with overwhelmingly bipartisan votes… create more than 10,000 jobs, save more than $300 million for the state in the first 18 months, and, most important, provide several hundred thousand uninsured Washingtonians with health coverage. In Kentucky… expansion offered huge savings in the state budget and is expected to create 17,000 jobs. In Connecticut, more than 50 percent of enrollment in the state exchange, Access Health CT, is for private health insurance. The Connecticut exchange has a customer satisfaction level of 96.5 percent, according to a survey of users in October, with more than 82 percent of enrollees either “extremely likely” or “very likely” to recommend the exchange to a colleague or friend.

In our states, elected leaders have decided to put people, not politics, first….

Thanks to health-care reform and the robust exchanges in our states, people are getting better coverage at a better price….

These sorts of stories could be happening in every state if politicians would quit rooting for failure and directly undermining implementation of the Affordable Care Act — and, instead, put their constituents first. Health reform is working for the people of Washington, Kentucky and Connecticut because elected leaders on both sides of the aisle came together to do what is right for their residents.

We urge Congress to get out of the way and to support efforts to make health-care reform work for everyone. We urge our fellow governors, most especially those in states that refused to expand Medicaid, to make health-care reform work for their people too.

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November 19, 2013

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