It's OK To Feel Good About Obamacare Again!

The single most significant "poor life choice" is smoking.

Notably, the GOP opposes any legislation that would compromise Americans' "freedom" to smoke.

America's second poorest life choice is fat-and-sugar-rich diet which fuels the nation's burgeoning diabetes epidemic.

Republicans are absolutely opposed to legislation that would inhibit Americans from eating like pigs. As the following photo of Sarah Palin reveals, American conservatives actively support pathogenic diet.

The GOP

Mistaking license for liberty.

24/7

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"Diabetes Epidemic Will Hit Half Of U.S. By 2020"
http://www.webmd.com/diabetes/news/20101123/diabetes-epidemic-will-hit-half-of-us-by-2020

The so-called Party of Personal Responsibility represents humankind's high water mark of Personal Irresponsibility.

"All this was inspired by the principle - which is quite true in itself - that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.  

Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler

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COHN: It's OK to feel good about Obamacare again. "Whatever the final tally, you can count on law's critics to keep saying the number is less impressive than it seems....All of these arguments have some truth. And you should think about them when, inevitably, the Administration celebrates the final enrollment statistics. But if the real story about Obamacare is a lot more complicated than the signup figures indicate, it's also a lot more complicated than the conservative caricature of Obamacare would have you believe. The Affordable Care Act has unleashed a great many changes -- some good, some bad, some in between. And it's going to be a long time before there's enough evidence to assess them carefully. But the available data points offer hints about what is happening. And while they don't add up to a clear, definitive vindication of the law, they are enough to justify some real optimism -- the kind that hasn't been possible since October 1, the day healthcare.gov launched, crashed, and nearly took the whole liberal cause into cyberhell with it." Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic.

DOUTHAT: Obamacare lives! "We don't know yet what the paid enrollment looks like or how successfully the program is actually enrolling the uninsured. (After some grim estimates, this Rand study is making liberals feel a little more optimistic, but still suggests a below-expectations result.) We don't know what the age-and-health-status composition of the enrollee pools looks like or what that means for premiums next year and beyond. We don't know if any of the suspended/postponed provisions of the law will actually take effect. And we certainly don't know what any of this means for social policy in the long run. But we do know that there won't be an immediate political unraveling, and that we aren't headed for the kind of extremely-low-enrollment scenario that seemed conceivable just a few months ago, or the possible world where cancellations had ended up outstripping enrollment, creating a net decline in the number of insured. And knowing that much has significant implications for our politics. It means that the kind of welfare-state embedding described above is taking place on a significant scale, that a large constituency will be served by Obamacare (through Medicaid as well as the exchanges) in 2016 and beyond, and that any kind of conservative alternative will have to confront the reality that the kind of tinkering-around-the-edges alternatives to Obamacare that many Republicans have supported to date would end up stripping coverage from millions of newly-insured Americans." Ross Douthat in The New York Times.

SUROWIECKI: Young, healthy and not so important for Obamacare. "The fear is that if enough young people don't enroll, the program is headed for what economists call a 'death spiral': health-care costs will be too high relative to premiums, which will force insurance companies to raise premiums, which will make young people even less likely to sign up, raising costs even more, and so on, until the whole thing implodes. It's a grim prospect, but there isn't much reason to think that we're headed for it. Getting more young people to enroll in Obamacare would be a good thing for the program (and for them -- a 2011 Commonwealth Fund survey found that sixty per cent of uninsured young adults had foregone care because of costs, and half reported medical debt or trouble paying medical bills). But the fate of the law doesn't depend on the young invincibles. As long as enough reasonably healthy people, regardless of age, sign up for health insurance, the imagined death spiral will never materialize. Everyone may be obsessed with what twenty-four-year-olds are doing, but having healthy forty-year-olds enroll in Obamacare could be just as important for the health of the program." James Surowiecki in The New Yorker.