“This Obamacare thing isn’t working.” Yeah. Like after, you know, six weeks.

Image from ajc.com

(This post is mostly verbatim from a post by a brilliant writer named scheming daemons, at Democratic Underground. I incorporated some of the thread responses and some thoughts of my own. But definitely go here to read it all.)

President Obama said, “You can keep your insurance.” The only people who are upset over that statement are people who are upset every single day Obama is in office.

“You can keep your insurance” affects 1/120^th of the population. Almost nobody reading this post is affected by this in the least.

There are roughly 320 million people in this country.  About 85% of us get health insurance through an employer, Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA. That means about 270 million of us are not affected at all by the healthcare.gov web site’s issues, or by the junk individual policies that are now being cancelled.

Among the 50 million who are affected, 40 million had no insurance at all. So it isn’t like the Affordable Care Act or the website’s problems made their situations worse. They are either better off, or the same.

That leaves ten million people. Roughly half of those are able to keep the plan they already have, because it complies with the ACA and their insurance company still offers it.

That leaves five million people that are losing their coverage and are forced to buy a new plan. Among those, roughly half will have access to a cheaper and better plan than they had before. The website issues that affect these people will be fixed, and they’ll be all right.

That leaves about 2.5 million people that are in a bind. Their insurance costs will be higher than before, even if the coverage is better.

That’s 1/120^th of the population. One out of every 120 people in this country has every right to be pissed off about Obamacare, at least in the short term.

But 40 million people.. one out of eight.. have access to insurance now who didn’t have it before.

Once that one out of eight gets insurance, the math won’t work anymore for the opponents of the ACA. That is why they are desperate to kill it in the crib. But the only way they can kill it is if they can convince enough of the voting public that it harms them.  What the GOP and their friends in the “liberal” media (ha!) have been trying to do is to convince everyone that they are one of the 1/120^th of the population that is being adversely affected.

As a utilitarian, I accept policies that help (or don’t harm) 119/120^th of the population while inconveniencing, in the short run, 1/120^th of the population.

But suddenly the GOP is terribly, terribly, deeply concerned about 1/120^th of the population. This is the only time I remember Republicans ever being terribly, terribly, deeply concerned about a minority. Well, besides the upper 1%, that is.