Fox NoiseWhat? Ya mean we wuz supposeta sign up for evil, liberty-destroying Obamacare? Who knew? And now this terrible surprise creeps up on us. (Even though people who were in even occasional contact with reality knew about it . . . well, from the start. Apparently nobody told poor Jim Angle, or his editors.)by KenThanks to HuffPost's Joan McCarter ("Fox News outraged that all the people it told not to buy insurance can't get insurance until fall") for calling attention to Brian Beutler's newrepublic.com post "The Right's New Scam: Feigning Anger on Behalf of People They Encouraged to Skip Obamacare."Unbelievable.Or at least it would be if we weren't talkling about Fox Noisemakers. I keep imagining (dreaming?) that at some point the Lying Liars of the Right will be held accountable in some fashion for their lifetimes of spreading lies and delusions. This in spite of the overwhelming evidence that no, it's not going to happen.True, a major part of the Right-Wing Noise Machine infrastructure is made up of mental primitives -- affectionately known as "hannities" -- who show no evidence of any mental capacity for learning or reasoning (possibly the necessary circuitry is present in their brains but is merely permanently set ion the "off" position) and may therefore be sincerely unaware that the incessant screeching that comes out of their mouths is all lies and delusions, and it might be argued that they shouldn't be subject to the appropriate penalties for their actions, by reason of mental defect. Which leaves plenty of right-wing blowhards who know, or have no excuse for not knowing, that they're full of it.These are the very people, as you can't possibly have forgotten, who from the time the Affordable Care Act was signed into law have been screeching nonstop at the top of their lungs that it is:* the greatest evil perpetrated in the history of the human race* the death of liberty, and probably of Truth, Justice, and the American Way* on the verge of repeal, if there's any decency left in the worldThere was an idea behind the Right-Wing Noisemakers' "variety of efforts (both subtle and explicit) to discourage people, particularly young people, from enrolling in ACA-compliant health plans." That idea, says, Brian,
was to deny state-based insurance markets critical mass, and sound risk pools, and send them into actuarial death spirals. In almost every instance, conservatives were appealing to strangers to undertake considerable personal risk in service of dubious ideological principles.
Now the Noisemakers may not have achieved "the larger goal," Brian says, "but they almost certainly succeeded at convincing some people to skip Obamacare."
And when confronted about the recklessness of their strategy, the most unscrupulous conservatives would say, No biggie! Obamacare allows people to enroll after they get sick or injured. So there's no risk at all.
"This was a lie," Brian says.
And if it weren't such a dangerous lie, I'd be amused to find that conservatives now want you to be outraged about the fact that the Affordable Care Act creates limited open-enrollment periods each year to prohibit precisely that kind of free riding.
And Jim quotes from Jim Angle's Fox Noise blitherama:
There is yet another ObamaCare surprise waiting for consumers: from now until the next open enrollment at the end of this year, most people will simply not be able to buy any health insurance at all, even outside the exchanges."It's all closed down. You cannot buy a policy that is a qualified policy for the purpose of the ACA (the Affordable Care Act) until next year on January 1," says John DiVito, president of Flexbenefit which has 2,500 brokers.John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas adds, "People are not going to be able to buy individual and family policies, and that's part of ObamaCare. And what makes it so surprising is the whole point of ObamaCare was to encourage people to get insurance, and now the market has been completely closed down for the next seven months."That means that with few exceptions, tens of millions of people will be locked out of the health insurance market for the rest of this year.
Joan McCarter points out in her HuffPost post that the shocking Fox Noise surprise is "not really news."
The practice of enrollment periods, embraced by the law, was designed specifically to address those "free-riders" Fox News would in any other circumstance hate -- the people who would wait until they needed health insurance to get it. The difference now, though, is that if those people get sick while they're uninsured, they don't have to worry about that preventing them from getting insurance once open enrollment kicks in again. (There are some exceptions: people who qualify can enroll in Medicaid or enroll their kids in SCHIP programs at any time, and people who have "qualifying life events" or other special circumstances as detailed here can sign up.)
"But of course," Joan adds,
Fox News doesn't really care about all the people it told not to sign up who didn't sign up and now don't have care. Nor do they care that they're showing their rank hypocrisy in pushing this story. Just as long as they have some Obamacare outrage story.
You know, come to think of it, this could just be yet another example of the Rupert Murdoch school of TV salesmanship. As my friend Peter loved to point out, on the Fox Network first they hyped their coverage of the great alien autopsy. Then without skipping a beat they hyped they coverage of the great alien-autopsy hoax story.This might not be the ideal business model if you were running, say, a TV news network. But if you're really wrangling a herd of Noisemakers, well, send in the clowns.#