A Healthy Dose of Silence

It was announced this week that 4 million people have signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, and that numbers appear to be going in the right direction for the goal of 7 million by the end of March.  It's encouraging, though to be fair, the numbers don't show how many people have paid for their plans yet (although figures from insurance carriers show that they believe this to be around 80 percent).  And there is no data yet on how many young people have signed up, something critical to the plan.  Those figures should be released next month. 

But still, the number of sign-ups is seen as an encouraging sign.  As is the fact that complaints about the healthcare.gov website has plummeted.

Interestingly, with the website working just fine now, we don't hear bleating cries from the Far Right about how a problematic new website is supposedly proof that the government can't do anything right and that the program is inherently bad.  One would think that by that same logic, the fact that the website is working would mean that that is proof that the government can do things right and that the program is inherently good.  Mind you, I don't think a working website proves any of that, just that those who did believe it about the bad news should believe the converse, at least if they were fair and honest.

Interestingly, too, when the first numbers of sign-ups were relatively small -- as was considered likely -- we also heard more bleating cries from the Far Right about how that was proof the ACA program was a dud.  But with 4 million signups already, it's so odd that we're not hearing that anymore.  ("So odd" will be herein defined as meaning "totally understandable when you're dealing with hypocrites.")

There still is a long way to go before knowing if the ACA program will be successful, and if so, how successful.  But when you hear silence from its opponents on the two main issues they were originally rending their hearts over, not nearly as much slamming of the word "Obamacare," or calls for the repeal of "Obamacare," and their criticism now is limited to finding random individuals who are having problems, you know things are going in the right direction towards working out...