The Most Ridiculous “Obamacare Victim” Outrage Yet
More: Why Isn’t Everyone More Worried About Me?
Apparently, there was a meeting of the editors at The New York Times op-ed page in which someone said, “You know how every time someone does a story about one of these Obamacare ‘victims’ whose insurance companies are cancelling their plans, it turns out they could do really well on the exchange, but no one bothers to check? We should get one of them to write an op-ed, but not bother to ask what options they’ll have.” And then someone else responded, “Right, don’t bother with the fact-checking. But we need a new twist. What if we find someone who’ll complain that the problem with Obamacare is that other people care too much about poor people and the uninsured, while what they ought to be doing is spending more time liking her Facebook post about her possibly increased premiums?” The editors looked at each other and said, “That’s gold. Gold!”
And this was the result. Written by Lori Gottlieb, a Los Angeles psychotherapist and author, it relates how she got a cancellation letter from Anthem Blue Cross and was offered a plan for $5,400 more a year, then had a frustrating phone call with the company. Did she go to the California health exchange and find out what sorts of deals would be available to her? Apparently not. She took Anthem at their word—you can always trust insurance companies, after all!—then took to Facebook, where she “vented about the call and wrote that the president should be protecting the middle class, not making our lives substantially harder.”
And here’s where our story takes a shocking turn. Instead of expressing what she felt was the appropriate sympathy, those 1,037 people on Facebook she thought were her friends but turned out just to be “friends” had the nerve to point out that the Affordable Care Act will help millions of previously uninsured and uninsurable people get coverage. Gottlieb was disgusted with these people she termed the “smug insureds.” And none of them even “liked” her post!
Like Bridget Jones’s “smug marrieds,” the “smug insureds” — friends who were covered through their own or spouses’ employers or who were grandfathered into their plans — asked why I didn’t “just” switch all of our long-term doctors, suck it up and pay an extra $200 a month for a restrictive network on the exchange, or marry the guy I’m dating. How romantic: “I didn’t marry you just to save money, honey. I married you for your provider network.”
Along with the smug insureds, President Obama doesn’t care much about the relatively small percentage of us with canceled coverage and no viable replacement. He keeps apologizing while maintaining that it’s for the good of the country, a vast improvement “over all.”
