{"id":4304,"date":"2014-04-01T19:51:43","date_gmt":"2014-04-02T00:51:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=4304"},"modified":"2014-04-01T19:51:43","modified_gmt":"2014-04-02T00:51:43","slug":"seven-million-and-counting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=4304","title":{"rendered":"Seven Million And Counting"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Six months ago, most observers would have bet that Obamacare would fail miserably at enrolling seven million people by March 31st. Hell, I wasn&#8217;t feeling particularly optimistic. But as the President announced today, that&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/04\/02\/us\/politics\/obama-to-report-on-progress-of-health-care-law.html\">exactly what happened<\/a>. This news will do little to deter opponents of health care reform from proclaiming yet again that the whole endeavor is either a misguided failure, a socialist plot, or both. \u00a0Fact on the ground matter, though. Obamacare now has a constituency; real people who will suffer if the law is repealed or scaled back. It&#8217;s a constituency that may not be the most politically well-connected, but they have a real stake in ensuring Obamacare&#8217;s success and longevity. Republicans will probably <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/online\/blogs\/johncassidy\/2014\/04\/ryan-budget-shows-gop-stuck-in-rah-rah-land.html\">continue to pretend that this constituency doesn&#8217;t exist<\/a>, even it makes them seem increasingly oblivious to reality.<\/p>\n<p>I expect the law to be tweaked and revised in coming years, as it should be. But Obamacare is now a permanent fixture of America&#8217;s policy landscape, a fact worthy of a little celebration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Six months ago, most observers would have bet that Obamacare would fail miserably at enrolling seven million people by March 31st. Hell, I wasn&#8217;t feeling particularly optimistic. But as the President announced today, that&#8217;s exactly what happened. This news will do little to deter opponents of health care reform from proclaiming yet again that the <a href='https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=4304' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[25,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-care","category-politics","category-25-id","category-18-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-17q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4304"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4305,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4304\/revisions\/4305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}