Fox News' Chris Wallace Discovers Huuuuuge Problem With Obamacare: Too Many Poor People Will Get Medicaid Now

From the keen analytical mind of Fox Sunday's Chris Wallace, this explanation of why the Affordable Care Act is just a giant pink furry ball of fail:

“One of the problems so far is that many more people are signing up for Medicaid than are signing up to the private insurance plans in the market place,”

Yes. Medicaid expansion is working really well, and that is a problem because... um. Wallace seems to be suggesting that the slow start to enrollment in private insurance is linked to the funding for Medicaid; in reality, Medicaid is a federal outlay that has nothing to do with anyone signing up for private insurance, and it was completely expected that it would be expanded without much of a problem -- it's just a matter of changing the eligibility requirements.

In other news, Wallace complained that ever since he bought that new brand of underarm deodorant, he's been getting lousy gas mileage.

During a discussion with former White House health care adviser Ezekiel Emanuel and the American Enterprise Institute’s James Capretta, Wallace noted that expanding the Medicaid eligibility to families with 133 percent of the poverty level had allowed tens of thousands of people to sign up in several states.

Capretta claimed that the ACA is destined for a "death spiral" because most people who qualify for Medicaid are signing up, while people who will be required to purchase insurance will put it off until the last minute, or not sign up at all.

Emanuel pointed out that the government hadn't expected a lot of people to sign up in the first month of the exchange, but that the healthcare.gov site does need to be working smoothly by November 30. He didn't call out Wallace on his bizarre linkage of the Medicaid expansion with the private insurance plans.

“We have all the way until March 31 to get 5 to 7 million people and we would expect naturally -- I don’t pay attention to those numbers, by the way -- because we would expect naturally people will put off buying until the end and therefore those numbers are irrelevant,” he added.

Ah, but if nobody signs up, then the private exchanges could fail, couldn't they? Sure, just like if everybody goes Galt next week, Social Security will collapse right quick, and if everybody stopped watching Fox News, the national IQ would go up noticeably. It's been a month, and there are already tens of thousands of poor people who now have access to healthcare. Only on Fox News can that be framed as a "problem."

[ RawStory ]