Obamacare as the Opposite of Government Failure

    Yep, it's early but its looking like the rate shock is of the right kind for Obamacare:

   "Lots of reporting on the new Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of what we know so far (pdf) about premiums under Obamacare. It definitely looks as if there will be a mild “rate shock” — in the right direction. KFF:

While premiums will vary significantly across the country, they are generally lower than expected.

     "What’s going on here? Partly it’s a vindication of the idea that you can make health insurance broadly affordable if you ban discrimination based on preexiting conditions while inducing healthy individuals to enter the risk pool through a combination of penalties and subsidies. But there’s an additional factor, that even supporters of the Affordable Care Act mostly missed: the extent to which, for the first time, the Act is creating a truly functioning market in nongroup insurance."

     "Until now there has been sort of a market — but one that, as Kenneth Arrow pointed out half a century ago, is riddled with problems. It was very hard for individuals to figure out what they were buying — what would be covered, and would the policies let them down? Price and quality comparisons were near-impossible. Under these conditions the magic of the marketplace couldn’t work — there really wasn’t a proper market. And insurers competed with each other mainly by trying to avoid covering people who really needed insurance, and finding excuses to drop coverage when people got sick."

     "With the ACA, however, insurers operate under clear ground rules, with clearly defined grades of plan and discrimination banned. The result, suddenly, is that we have real market competition."

    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/it-takes-a-government-to-make-a-market/?_r=0

     This is really serious: much worse than a government failure-for conservatives-is the ACA: an apparent government success. The idea that the government was needed in order to create a functioning market is galling to the ears of conservatives as they want to so much to believe the opposite-that government is always the problem and can do nothing right. Krugman mentioned Arrow-who was only the guy who gave us the model that showed markets work. Yet he never believed that the market left to itself  could get healthcare right.

    http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/08/kenneth-arrows-on-market-efficiency-in.html

    So this case of government success would not have surprised him. It won't be too long now before conservatives will run on 'saving Obamacare'-maybe they'll use the usual schizophrenic arguments-like the Tea Party lady in 2010 who wanted the government to keep it's dirty hands of her Medicare. 

    https://www.google.com/search?q=take+your+government+hands+off+my+medicare&rlz=1C1ASUT_enUS524US524&oq=take+your+government+hands+&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0j69i61l2.6198j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

  http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/prescriptions/2009/08/the_medicareisntgovernment_meme.html

    Maybe they'll run on the ACA against Obamacare, or maybe by 2020 or so, they'll then love Obama-much as they now love Clinton but using him to attack the Democratic President in 2020.