LOL, three good images there arizona, especially the middle one i'm replying to.
By Jonathan Chait September 24, 2015 11:42 a.m.
Barack Obama speaks on health care at Faneuil Hall in Boston, Massachusetts. Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
When he ran for president, Barack Obama promised that his health-care plan would hold down inflation in the medical sector enough to eventually save the average family $2,500 a year. The cost of health care had been growing far faster than inflation for decades, but Obama believed his reform could “bend the curve” of cost growth downward. The $2,500 figure was a rough projection of the cumulative savings that accrue.
Meanwhile, costs have continued to fall, causing the Congressional Budget Office — whose original forecasts conservatives dismissed as unrealistically optimistic — to keep revising its estimates of the costs of Obamacare lower and lower:
And, yes, even as health inflation has dropped, the nominal cost of health insurance has risen. But Obama did not promise a nominal price cut. It is true that he never specified the baseline against which his $2,500 savings would apply, because political candidates usually do not detail their baseline assumptions when they deliver stump speeches. A sensible interpretation of Obama’s promise would be a $2,500 savings against the baseline of existing projections — Obama’s reforms would save the average family $2,500 compared to what would happen if his reforms were not enacted. That promise, again, has come true.
Merline and Gillespie instead assume that Obama was using a baseline of existing nominal prices. The only way Obama’s reforms could succeed is not only if the decades of medical inflation slowed their rate, but if prices actually dropped in nominal terms. Of course, Obama never actually said anything like this. Merline does not even claim he did. Instead, he insists that it kinda “seems” like Obama meant this: “So was [Obama] talking about lowering the rate of increase? It sure didn't seem that way. On CNN he said, ‘We're going to reduce costs an average of $2,500.’”
Oh, it "seems" that way, huh? That's your argument? The reason it makes sense to judge Obamacare against an alternative world in which decades of medical inflation drop to zero percent a year is that it "seems" as if he made this insanely grandiose promise?
So, yes, if you assume that Obama meant an implausibly unrealistic promise that he did not actually say, then his reforms have fallen short. If you instead judge them against historic standards, or a plausible reading of what he meant, they have been an unqualified success.
The determination of Obamacare haters to claim vindication is a testament to the power of the human spirit in the face of all factual evidence. Right-wingers have every right to ideologically oppose the concept of a government program that uses regulation, taxes, and spending to provide insurance to people who can't afford it. Their unwillingness to concede that this program is working on its own terms is delusional.