Ezra Klein: What Obama meant was if you lose your plan you can get another one

I never cease to be amazed by the thinking among the punditry that Ezra Klein is some sort of whiz kid. It seems to be one of these ideas that gained momentum for an unknown reason and just snowballed. You read his "Wonkblog" in the Washington Post, you see his TV appearances, and he comes off as that smug, prissy liberal who is always raising his hand in Political Science 305, and is way more impressed by his own rudimentally knowledge than he ought to be. But everyone keeps muttering about how "bright" he is even as you shake your head and wonder what's making them say that.

Maybe it's because it's not that easy to come up with excuses for the lies of your president/hero, and while no one is saying the latest alibi Klein has come up with is compelling in any way, at least you have to give him some credit for brazenness - even if it merely stems from lack of self-awareness with respect to truth and plausibility. Obama didn't lie, or maybe he did, Klein explains. But that's OK because he really meant to promise something else that actually is true:

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President Obama's critics are right: ObamaCare doesn't guarantee that everyone who likes their health insurance can keep it. In some cases, ObamaCare is the reason people will lose health insurance they liked. What ObamaCare comes pretty close to guaranteeing, though, is that everyone who needs health insurance, or who wants health insurance, can get it. It guarantees that if you lose the plan you liked — perhaps because you were fired from your job, or because you left your job to start a new business, or because your income made you ineligible for Medicaid — you'll have a choice of new plans you can purchase, you'll know that no insurer can turn you away, and you'll be able to get financial help if you need it. In states that accept the Medicaid expansion, it guarantees that anyone who makes less than 133 percent of poverty can get fully subsidized insurance. Health insurance isn't such a fraught topic in countries such as Canada and France because people don't live in constant fear of losing their ability to get routine medical care. A decade from now, that will be true in the U.S., too. But it's not true yet, and paradoxically, that's one reason health reform is so difficult. The status quo has left people rightly fearful, and when people are afraid, change is even scarier.

One of the favorite tendencies of liberal whiz kids is the use of quick, pop psychological evaluations of "people" as an explanation for why they don't accept the unfailingly wise master plans of liberals. They're fearful of the status quo, don't you know, and that makes them even more fearful of change, you see, so the promise Obama meant to make has them scared even though whiz kids like Klein can recognize its awesomeness. By the way, Klein's take on the policy substance here is completely wrong. If you have insurance and you lose it, you can only get new insurance if you can afford it. And you only get a subsidy if you earn less than four times the poverty level. Whiz Kid doesn't seem to have a good handle on the fact that people who make four times the poverty level could be spending close to 20 percent of their after-tax income of health insurance premiums in order to pay for one of the new ObamaCare-approved policies. Yeah, you could get that, but why would you want to? It's a bad value and it's income most will piss away in exchange for something that will never give them a reasonable return. Ironically, Obama is going around justifying this fiasco by claiming it at least keeps people from going bankrupt because they have an illness. That's ironic because the reason a lot of people were happy with their "sub-standard" insurance (according to Obama) is that it covered them for the sort of catastrophic occurrence that would have put them at risk of bankruptcy, but otherwise left them to pay their own bills. That is exactly the sort of insurance a lot of people chose, since it protected them against major risk while leaving them with premiums they could afford. But this type of plan is now illegal because of ObamaCare. So yeah, if you were happy with your plan and you lost it, you can now get a new plan you likely will not be happy with. And Klein assures us that this is what Obama really meant to promise us, so it's all good. I guess that's the advantage to having Whiz Kids around to defend you. They're not even knowledgeable enough about how policies really work to understand when you've set the nation sailing down a river of crap - so it all looks good to them! They just have to imagine what they suppose they probably think you meant, and explain that you should be happy with it, because they don't understand why you're not, and at any rate they're pretty sure you don't know what's good for you anyway. You, Mr. Self-Employed Entrepreneur with 25 years' experience paying for your own health care, should have gotten a Whiz Kid to explain it to you.