Obamacare Saves Lives

And the failure to expand Medicaid in Republican states costs, perfectly young and healthy lives. As The New Republic points out, the Democrats are running away from the benefits of the law, which is a foolish strategy since even if they oppose the President they are going to get tied to the law anyway.

Particularly jarring is how progressives/liberals fail to counter false Republican narratives about bad experiences with their own anecdotal rebuttals, that also have the benefit of being actually true. Which brings us back to Ms. Dill’s story in the TNR article.

Five days later, it has practically vanished from the national Obamacare debate. Hundreds of thousands of people now know Dill’s story, but the liberal media isn’t really making an issue of it, Democrats outside of Florida have been unusually reticent about it, too, and the Florida legislature remains unwilling to expand its Medicaid program, despite the brief surge of bad publicity.

That cautiousness simultaneously reflects the left’s greatest political strength and weakness: its relatively healthy epistemological standards, and its at-times lamentable unwillingness to seize its own political advantage.

The truth about Dill’s story is that we’ll never know how it would have ended if Florida had expanded its Medicaid program, and Dill had obtained the coverage she sought. It’s a counterfactual that’s impossible to test precisely because Dill is dead. The Think Progress headline, and the post’s lead paragraph, thus rest on an unprovable assertion. It’s certainly possible—perhaps likely—that Dill would not have died if she’d been on Medicaid. But we can’t say for sure.

We can’t keep responding to Welfare Queen myths with CBO reports, we have to hit them back and hit them hard with personal stories of our own. It’s an anecdotal nation driven by personal politics after all.

Please share widely!

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