Thread by @asymmetricinfo

Hey, y'all, we've got just half an hour to tweetstorm my latest article, on Obamacare's failure, and the Democratic decision to keep pounding on health care reform: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/…

Reminder: this tweetstorm will not summarize the column; you will need to read it to find out what it says. I merely answer some of the most common questions.

Question: "How dare you lie about Obamacare! You claim it didn't increase coverage, when in fact, it's covering millions of people!"

Answer: It did increase coverage, temporarily. But at this point, coverage seems to be ... about where we'd expect it to be, given the economy.

Many people took issue with my choice of 2008 as a comparison year, rather than 2013, when Obamacare took effect. So let me explain why 2008 is the correct comparison year.

Simply put: it's the economy, er ... non-stupid person asking a reasonable question.

In 2013, unemployment was still north of 7%. It's now 3.6%. We would expect the uninsured rate to have declined substantially since 2013.

In 2008, when Gallup started polling, unemployment was around 5%--worse than it is now, but better than 7.5%!

Comparisons to 2013 will make Obamacare look artificially good, not because it did anything, but because in 2013 we were still working through the worst financial crisis in 70 years. 2008, before the crisis, is the best comparison we have.

And in 2008, with unemployment at ca 5%, the uninsured rate was 14.6%. This year, with unemployment at 3.6%, the uninsured rate is 13.7%. That's a marginal effect at best, and you can't reject the hypothesis that it's basically no change.

Now, you can argue that this is only true because Republicans sabotaged it! I mentioned this argument, and I think it's probably correct. You probably can't blame Trump for all the increase in the rate of the uninsured; exchange coverage was already declining when he took office.

But the administration has done its best to gut Obamacare, and I think at least a percentage point of the increase in the uninsured should be attributed to that.

But of course, when Obamacare was in process, some people, possibly including [clears throat] me, pointed out that using parliamentary hacks to pass a massive new program that had never managed to poll 50% favs was a risky move because the program would be politically vulnerable

So it's not like this is some inconceivable result that no one could have foreseen. It was predictable, and predicted.

Should GOP be hacking away at Obamacare? I've argued against virtually everything this administration has tried on healthcare. But I didn't expect anything else

At any rate, whoever's fault it is, Obamacare seems to have failed at its primary endeavor: coverage expansion.

It's also failed on cost control. There's no inflection around the time of passage, or the exchanges going live. Whatever's left is small ball.

Question: So you prefer the GOP plan? WHy don't you tell us about Trumpcare and how "great" it's going to be?

Answer: The GOP has no plausible plan, & no plausible plan to develop one. It doesn't have to be this way--lots of smart conservatives thinking about HC. But it is.

The GOP spent SIX YEARS promising to get rid of Obamacare and replace it with something better. In that SIX YEARS they didn't bother to, you know, come up with a consensus plan for replacement and build party support for it. This is bad policy and bad politics.

As for Trump's promises that he's going to totally give us an awesome new plan that everyone will love ... pfft.

But the fact that the GOP didn't have a good alternative didn't make Obamacare a good idea. The fact that I didn't have a good alternative (well, actually I did, just not one that could pass) didn't make me wrong when I pointed this out.

I'm not sure if there's a name for the logical fallacy in believing that the inability to identify other ways to solve a problem means that your proposal to solve said problem will work, but it is deeply fallacious.

If I wanted to really twist the knife, I'd point out that "Obamacare must be a good idea because conservatives haven't proposed/implemented a better one" is eerily similar to conservatives talking about Trump's North Korean overtures

Raise your hand if you think *that's* working

Well, I said half an hour, and that's my half hour. I gotta hop. Read the column here, which--reminder--contains *ALL NEW MATERIAL* not covered in this tweetstorm.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/…