Anatomy of a Bogus Obamacare Argument
Well worth a read; Cohn calling out a conservative columnist. Props from me; more of this! 
!!
http://www.newrepublic.com/node/113362#
Anatomy of a Bogus Obamacare Argument
How an irresponsible Forbes writer distorted the debate
BY JONATHAN COHN
snip//
But the most amazing part of Roy’s entry was what it didn’t say. Roy never acknowledged that, even as young and healthy people would have to face higher premiums, older and sicker people would face lower premiums. He said absolutely nothing—not a single word!—about the federal subsidies available to people with incomes below 400 percent of the poverty line. (That's about $46,000 a year for a single adult, or $94,000 for a family of four.) This has been a pattern with his writing and, unfortunately, much of what I read on the right. Articles focus on the drawbacks of Obamacare but almost never acknolwedge the benefits.
Eventually, in response to criticism I made on Twitter, Roy added a postscript about the subsidies. And in a follow-up that Roy posted on Monday morning, he acknowledged them again—although only late in the piece, and in a highly misleading way. He wrote that only a “select few” will get the discounted prices, a point he's made over and over again. Actually, the majority of people buying coverage on the exchanges will get subsidies. It's difficult to be certain about the overall effect on all Californians buying coverage, because it requires insurer information not available to the public. But it's entirely possible (I'd say likely) that, with the subsidies, the majority of people buying on the exchange next year will pay less than they pay for insurance today.
Roy is no dummy. He’s well aware of these facts. He could have acknowledged them, and went on to make the case that the benefits are not worth those costs—that it’s fundamentally unfair to ask young, healthy, affluent people to pay more, or that Obamacare’s whole scheme is just so inefficient as to make it worse than the alternative. As Aaron Carroll wrote the other day, Obamacare involves real trade-offs: Higher-income people have to pay higher taxes, the health care industry has to endure lower payments from Medicare, and—yes—some young, healthy, affluent people have to pay more for private insurance. Those of us who support the law believe that's a worthwhile price to pay to help achieve universal coverage, given the lack of politically viable alternatives. Roy disagrees, I know, and he could have made that argument in a nuanced way last week.
But Roy didn’t do that. And while all of us are susceptible to hyperbole or selective intepretation from time to time, Roy's column was something else entirely. He plucked out two examples of people who would pay more in California, pretended they were emblematic of the system as a whole, then accused other writers of being irresponsible. His argument hasn't held up well to scrutiny, but it's part of the political conversation and, I'm sure, will remain so for a while.
In his follow-up post today, Roy says “we’re finally having the intellectually honest argument about Obamacare that we should have been having all along.” If only that were true.
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