Krugman: The ACA will "increase the burden on fortunate people — the healthy and wealthy — to lift [View all]

[pampango]

some burdens on the less fortunate: people with chronic illnesses or other preexisting conditions, low-income workers."

The Affordable Care Act isn’t magic — it produces losers as well as winners. But it’s not black magic either, turning everyone into a loser. What the Act does is in effect to increase the burden on fortunate people — the healthy and wealthy — to lift some burdens on the less fortunate: people with chronic illnesses or other preexisting conditions, low-income workers.

Conservatives appear to be really upset that liberals are actually taking on the facts in the anti-Obamacare ads they’ve been running. How dare you question whether the people in these ads are giving an accurate picture — they’re suffering!

But there’s a different kind of struggle anyone trying to point out the facts encounters — a barrage of anecdotes. You say that the Obamacare horror stories are fake, but I kind of know this man who is being told that he has to buy a policy he can’t possibly afford / I read this sad story in the Wall Street Journal / I heard this tale on the radio / etc.. And so far, every single one of those sob stories has turned out to be false — because the very nature of the reform is such that such things hardly ever happen.

Suppose, then, that someone comes to you with an anecdote about a cancer patient, or just an older person in poor health, and tells you that this person is about to lose the care she needs, or face a huge increase in expenses, under Obamacare. Well, it’s almost certainly not true — people like that are overwhelmingly beneficiaries of health reform, thanks to community rating, which means that they can’t be discriminated against because of their condition.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/26/a-general-theory-of-obamacare-fiction/

"... increase the burden on fortunate people to lift some burdens on the less fortunate..." That sure sounds like something that republicans will oppose on principle.