All of the Republican attempts to destroy the ACA are failing as 100,000 people signed up last month while the website was being repaired.
Bloomberg is reporting,
About 100,000 people signed up for health insurance through the online federal exchange last month, a roughly four-fold increase from October even as a team of U.S. government and contractor programmers was fixing the troubled Affordable Care Act website, said a person familiar with program’s progress.
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While far from the original goal, the jump in enrollment may be an encouraging trend for the administration and could signal that consumers are keeping an open mind about the new $1.4 trillion health law amid criticism from both Republicans and Democrats over the site’s technical failures.
The person who provided the November enrollment figures, said the data points to a steady increase in sign-ups even before major website improvements were completed at the end of November.
Meanwhile, in delusional Republican land, Republicans are still claiming that the ACA website is broken. The media has been helping the hapless party of no by continuing to insist that despite data to the contrary, the website is broken.
The good news for Democrats is that there was a four fold increase in enrollment while the website was still broken and being repaired. This is proof that the Republican attempts to scare people away from signing up for affordable health insurance are not working. People want what the ACA is offering so badly that they were willing to fight through a glitchy website to get it.
As the media was warning of gloom and doom and calling the Obama presidency over, people were signing up for health insurance. As 39 cowardly House Democrats were siding with Republicans on a bill that would have gutted the ACA, people were gaining access to affordable health insurance.
The media and the Republican Party are both wrong. The ACA is not going to doom Democrats and the Obama presidency. It is going to prove once and for all why Democrats are better at governing. The ACA will define and make President Obama’s legacy.
Ted Cruz can stand on the Senate floor for a thousand hours telling lies about the ACA and reading children’s books, and it won’t make a bit of difference. John Boehner can invent all of the website glitches that he wants, but it won’t matter.
Republicans are losing the fight on Obamacare, because they refuse to admit to themselves that people really really want this.
At the most basic level, Republicans are failing to convince people that they don’t want access to healthcare. By October 2014, Republican candidates across the country are going to stand in front of millions of voters and tell them that if elected they intend to take their health insurance away.
Republicans haven’t considered the fact that these people will want to keep their health insurance. They also haven’t considered the possibility that millions of parents want to keep their kids on their plans, and people like the fact that they can’t be denied coverage if they have a preexisting condition.
Most of all people will like their lower premiums, and the Republican response is going to be to tell these folks that they are going to take money out of their pockets and give it back to the insurance companies. This is not what folks whose job it is to run campaigns would call a winning strategy.
The media made some Democrats nervous, but they shouldn’t have been. They are on the right side of this issue. Once the ACA is running full steam ahead, the real winners won’t be President Obama and the Democratic Party. The real winners will be the millions of people who will have health insurance.
Republicans are failing. People are signing up, and the success of the ACA will deliver on a presidential promise to transform America in a way that even the most ambitious among us could have never imagined.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
