Christopher: 12 People Who Are Thankful for Obamacare

It looks like cable news’ Obamascare Fever is starting to break, but some in the print and online media have been well ahead of their more widely-seen colleagues. Since it’s Thanksgiving, this seems like a good time to look at Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik‘s reporting on the Obamacare anecdotes you haven’t been hearing about on TV: twelve people who have reason to be thankful this year because of Obamacare.

You may recall that it was Hiltzik who was among the few reporters who doggedly debunked the relentless stream of cable news horror stories that turned out not to be true, and in most cases, featured people who actually stood to benefit from the law. This week, he reported on several individuals, couples, and families who are going to be better off thanks to the new law:

Ellen Holzman and Meredith Vezina: Kicked off their plan because their insurance company tightened rules about its service area, the married gay couple were denied a new policy because Holzman might have had carpal tunnel syndrome.

“Through Covered California, the state’s individual insurance marketplace, they’ve found a plan through Sharp Healthcare that will cover them both for a total premium of $142 a month, after a government subsidy based on their income. They’ll have a higher deductible than Kaiser’s but lower co-pays. But their possible savings will be impressive,” Hiltzik reports.

Then there’s Judith Silverstein, who stands to save a lot under Obamacare, while enjoying a new level of health care security:

And Judith Silverstein, 49, a Californian who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2007. Her family helps her pay the $750 monthly cost of her existing plan–which she only had because of federal law requiring that insurers who provide employer-based insurance continue to offer coverage if the employer goes out of business, as hers did. Next year she’ll get a subsidy that will get her a good “silver” level plan for $50.

For Silverstein that coverage is indispensable. Her case is relatively mild, but MS is a progressive condition that typically has made its sufferers pariahs of the individual insurance market in the past. “I researched the options,” she says. “Nobody’s going to sell you insurance in the individual market if you have MS.” But these customers can’t be excluded or saddled with big premium markups any more.

Hiltzik even profiles a job-creating businessman who is benefiting from Obamacare:

Jason Noble, 44, who has his own property management firm in Southern California, found a gold plan that will cover his wife and their three children–a daughter, 9, and 5-year-old twins–for a little less than $1,300 a month. That’s slightly more than they’d be paying next year for their existing Blue Shield plan, but the benefits are much greater, including pediatric dental coverage. Their family deductible will fall from $3,400 to zero. Last year, the family had a health scare that ran them $1,800 in out-of-pocket expenses; a similar event next year would cost them nothing. “It’s definitely a good deal,” Noble says.

While Hiltzik acknowledges the anecdotal nature of these stories, and the difficulties that his subjects, of whom there are several more, experienced in enrolling for health insurance, he correctly sums up the distorted view that the law’s opponents are promoting, and which bad reporting reinforces.

Political opportunists (like House Speaker John Boehner), exploit near-term difficulties to obscure the tangible benefits the Affordable Care Act will bring to tens of millions of their constituents. When they say “this law has to go,” as Boehner’s spokesman did this weekend, they’re talking about returning people to the era of exclusions for pre-existing conditions. To people learning they’re uninsurable because of injuries from accidents, or chronic diseases, or the sheer bloody-mindedness of insurance company bureaucrats.

Let’s hear Boehner and his people explain to Holzman and Vezina, the Shevlinos, the Nobles, the Sheppards, and Silverstein–and to 20-30 million other Americans like them who might be locked out of the individual insurance market without the law they ridicule as “Obamacare”–how they’d be better off that way.

The avalanche of negative early reporting on the Obamacare rollout has taken a severe toll on the Democrats, and on the law itself, but as the enrollment problems get sorted out, stories like the ones Hiltzik highlights will become more numerous, and they won’t just be told in the media, they’ll be told around dinner tables and water coolers. That’s why Republican opposition to the law has been so urgent, because once the thing gets going, all those people who are better off will become voters that they won’t get.
[photo via Caleb Howe]

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.