Which Party Will Fix Obamacare?

Laszewski believes the ACA’s big problem is that not “enough people are signing up for it to be sustainable in the long-term because the products it offers are unattractive”:

The polls and the market’s response to Obamacare are all consistent: The program is not attractive and needs some serious fixing but it isn’t going to be repealed. Republicans can continue to exploit this issue only if they understand this. And, Democrats can win the issue back, or at least neutralize it, if they can get beyond their current euphoria over “eight million” and get real about how unhappy people are with the program and the plans it offers––and come up with a plan to fix Obamacare.

I feel like I’m watching a football game here. The ball (Obamacare) has been fumbled. It’s bouncing down the field up for grabs. The Republicans are saying they don’t have to chase the fumble because, “We’re are so far ahead we’re going to win the game anyway.” The Democrats are saying, “What fumble?” They’ve got “eight million reasons why the ball hasn’t been fumbled.”

Relatedly, Cohn reads a McKinsey report that sheds light on the uninsured population:

About half of the people who McKinsey surveyed did not end up buying insurance—either because they shopped and found nothing they liked, or because they didn’t shop at all. When asked to explain these decisions, the majority of these people said they thought coverage would cost too much. But two-thirds of these people said they didn’t know they could get financial assistance. In other words, they assumed they would have to pay the sticker price for coverage, even though federal tax credits would have lowered the price by hundreds or thousands of dollars a year.

With a little education and outreach, many of these people will discover that insurance costs less than they thought. When next year’s open enrollment period begins, they are more likely to get coverage. But the idea was to help more of those people this year. And if the administration deserves some blame for this shortfall, its adversaries deserve more. Republicans and their allies did their best to taint the law—and, where possible, to undermine efforts to promote it. Without such obstruction, even more uninsured people would probably be getting coverage right now.

In other Obamacare opining, McArdle wonders why the administration encouraged small states to set up their own exchanges:

I understand the argument for having state-based exchanges as an option. One of the nifty things about federalism is that states can be little laboratories, finding stuff that works that other states can then copy. I also understand the political argument that this appeased moderate Democrats, who were uncomfortable with the idea of a giant federal exchange taking over such an important economic function.

But the administration went far beyond “option”: It aggressively pushed state exchanges, repeatedly extending the deadline to decide until long after it was too late for anyone, state or federal, to do a good job building one. I can understand why they’d push big states such as Texas and Florida to build exchanges. But why encourage the District of Columbia, Hawaii and Rhode Island to follow suit? Arithmetically, it was unlikely that any of them would insure enough people to become financially viable — and certainly not in the time frame called for by the law. Why not quietly point out the terrible math and suggest they go federal?