Evening Must-Read: Jonathan Cohn: Five Rules for Talking About Obamacare in 2014

Jonathan Cohn: Five Rules for Talking About Obamacare in 2014 | New Republic:

The debate over the law’s merits will continue, at least through the midterm elections and perhaps beyond. And the debate will probably look a lot like it has for the past few months, with proponents and critics arguing not just about priorities but also basic facts…. But if we’re destined to keep having these same fights over and over again, maybe can learn to have them more intelligently. With that in mind, here are five rules…. RULE #1: DON’T IGNORE THE OBVIOUS…. When the NBC News ‘investigations’ unit reported [plan cancellations] as a major scoop, I noted with a little snark that the article’s source was a set of regulations published years before in the Federal Register—in other words, hardly the stuff of Woodward and Bernstein. But rate increases and plan cancellations were news anyway. And journalists like me were wrong not to recognize that…. RULE #2: PAY ATTENTION TO SCALE. There’s nothing wrong with personal anecdotes…. But anecdotes matter a lot more when they tell us about broader trends…. RULE #3: ACCEPT AMBIGUITY…. Our knowledge of insurance coverage comes primarily from surveys and studies—some by private organizations like Gallup, and some from government agencies like the Census. Our knowledge of what people are paying for medical care and what kind of care they get? That comes primarily from studies that take months, if not years. We can make some pretty good guesses, based on what’s happened in the past. But we rarely know as much as we’d like to think. RULE #4: ACKNOWLEDGE COMPLEXITY AND TRADE-OFFS…. Obamacare sets in motion all kinds of changes. They will typically affect different people in different ways—creating winners, losers, and all sorts of people in between…. RULE #5: CONSIDER THE REAL COUNTER-FACTUAL…. Just because something is happening and Obamacare exists doesn’t mean it’s happening because Obamacare exists—even in health care. This is probably the most important rule of all. It will be tempting to judge Obamacare by comparing it to the status quo. But the status quo was changing already. Preserving it was simply not an option…