Afternoon Must-Read: Ezra Klein: In Conservative Media, Obamacare Is a Disaster. In the Real World, It’s Working

Ezra Klein: In conservative media, Obamacare is a disaster. In the real world, it’s working: “Before Obamacare launched…

…conservative outlets warned that the law would collapse as insurers shunned the overpriced, overregulated insurance exchanges…. I remember, a month or two after HealthCare.Gov opened (and crashed), being on a panel with a conservative writer who said that Obamacare might well enter a death spiral as insurers pull out of the marketplaces. On Tuesday, the idea that insurers would flee Obamacare joined the long procession of Obamacare disasters that simply didn’t happen…. This news is not, as I write this on Tuesday evening, being carried on the home pages of Fox Business, HotAir.com, or the Heritage Foundation. (In case you’re wondering, the most recent Obamacare article on FoxBusiness.com is “Obamacare website still not secure?”; on Hot Air.com, it’s “How many people are poised to lose 2014 Obamacare coverage?”; at Heritage, it’s “Why you can’t keep your plan under Obamacare, explained in 3 minutes”.)… My hunch is that relatively few conservatives realize that premiums are lower-than-expected, and that the law’s costs are lower-than-expected ($104 billion lower, as of April 2014)….

Republicans have, for a long time, been putting forward health-care plans that would devolve single-payer insurance programs like Medicare to private insurers that would hold down costs by narrowing networks and managing care. Then, they figure, Americans can shop around, and the market will reward the plans that hold down costs and punish the plans that don’t. These ideas were present in the health reforms Mitt Romney passed in Massachusetts, and Obamacare borrowed heavily from them. Rep. Paul Ryan has also been a key sponsor of these ideas. But now that they’re happening in Obamacare, he’s selling it to conservatives like some kind of catastrophe…. Except that very dynamic is exactly the way Ryan’s own fabled Medicare plan is designed to work…. On the whole… costs are lower than expected, enrollment is higher than expected, the number of insurers participating in the exchanges is increasing, and more states are joining the Medicaid expansion. Millions of people have insurance who didn’t have it before. The law is working. But a lot of the people who are convinced Obamacare is a disaster will never know that, because the voices they trust will never tell them.