We have a twofer today, so let’s begin with Megan McArdle:
As we head into the final few weeks, we have a pretty good idea of how many young healthy people there will be, and the answer is: a whole lot fewer than the health-care wonks were expecting.
But wait a minute! I hear you cry. We don’t know any such thing! After all, everyone expects a lot of young healthy people to wait until the last minute! Are you saying they’re wrong?
Not exactly. I too expect the demographics of March enrollment to skew younger than prior months. But at this point, unless that enrollment is truly massive, I don’t think that will be enough.
Stupid young invincibles, refusing to buy stuff they don’t need with money they don’t have just to fulfill someone else’s vision of what’s good for them. Ingrates.
As a citizen of Bailout Nation in somewhat good standing, I realize the actual solvency of ♡bamaCare!!! isn’t really an issue. They’ll keep pumping our living blood into that corpse until it rises zombielike to consume our flesh.
Or perhaps not, because presumably Congress would have to vote for bailout funds. And for the latest on the Democrats holding the Senate, let us go now to Michael Barone, who compares the defense of ♡bamaCare!!! with the defense of France after Hitler’s armored formations burst through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes forest:
Today’s Democrats face losing an election, not a nation, and the cause is Obamacare. They stand on ground of their own choosing, which they suddenly find themselves unable to defend, and they must hope that the opposition makes disabling mistakes.
That has been made starkly clear by Republican David Jolly’s defeat of the better-known Democrat Alex Sink in the Florida-13 special election on March 11. The margin wasn’t large, 49 percent to 47 percent, and the dropoff in Democratic vote not huge — President Obama carried the district 50 percent to 49 percent in 2012.
What was more significant is that the well-financed, national party-selected Sink was unable to defend her ground.
Entirely missing from her campaign was a message along the lines of “hands off my Obamacare.” You would have heard something like that if a Republican had advocated repealing Social Security or Medicare a year or two after these programs were passed.
But support for Obamacare has been under 50 percent since before it was passed. Democrats would be running ads showing happy Obamacare consumers if they could find any.
The Democrats have been showing happy ♡bamaCare!!! customers on Twitter and elsewhere, but nothing that would make good TV. The social media displays run along the lines of Happy Vaguely Ethnic Woman, smiling about the generous health insurance subsidies she’s receiving via Other Peoples’ Money. That’s fine for comforting the young base on Twitter, but bragging on local TV about going on the dole is no way to win independents, I would think.
The further the Battle of France analogy, there was a story from the war (and I’m told that it’s true) of a young officer running in panicked retreat from the rapidly-approaching Panzers and Stuka divebombers. Confronted by his CO he shouts, “But sir, they’re BOMBING us!”
We saw the results of a very limited bombing campaign in Florida last week — the equivalent of a few Stukas on a small sector of the front. Just wait until the skies are filled with B-17s.
Grab us some beers while I pop the corn, mmkay?
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