{"id":4436,"date":"2014-12-06T13:24:07","date_gmt":"2014-12-06T19:24:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=4436"},"modified":"2014-12-06T13:24:07","modified_gmt":"2014-12-06T19:24:07","slug":"two-tales-of-one-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=4436","title":{"rendered":"Two Tales Of One Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Vox (my favorite new site of 2014), Sarah Kliff has a great article pointing out the emerging and conflicting narratives of the Affordable Care Act<\/a>. From a political perspective, the ACA seems like a train wreck. It continues to poll terribly, its backers have made some boneheaded remarks about American voters<\/a>, and senior Democrats like Senator Chuck Schumer are now saying that it was a mistake to pass health care reform<\/a>. This is not what the story of a successful law should look like.<\/p>\n

And yet, the actual policies seem to be working<\/a>. More Americans have health coverage than ever before. Health care costs are slowing at a remarkable rate. And during the current open enrollment period, over 750,000 individuals have already selected an ACA health plan.<\/p>\n

The law continues to offer real benefits for millions of people, but this fact gets lost in the political echo chamber. As for second-guessing Democrats like Schumer, I suggest they take a running leap into a very shallow lake. If Democrats had done a better job of actually explaining how the ACA helps people, the conservative misinformation campaign might have been less successful. They could have also fought harder for a public option plan or, even better, Medicare for all. Instead, they spent an interminable amount of time trying to win conservative support that never materialized.<\/p>\n

The ACA is certainly a flawed piece of legislation, but it is ultimately making life better for Americans. Rumors of its demise remain greatly exaggerated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Vox (my favorite new site of 2014), Sarah Kliff has a great article pointing out the emerging and conflicting narratives of the Affordable Care Act. From a political perspective, the ACA seems like a train wreck. It continues to poll terribly, its backers have made some boneheaded remarks about American voters, and senior […]<\/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-4436","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-19y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4436","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=4436"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4437,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4436\/revisions\/4437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}