While this is Rolling Stone magazine that's hardly conservative friendly, I'm not aware of any great distortions of the facts, and now that the law seems to be, grosso modo, working as advertised, I'm no closer to the answer of the question at the beginning of this thread, why it has met such extraordinary passionate resistance, given:
- It was a conservative idea (Heritage foundation)
- It has been implemented by a conservative presidential candidate, in Massachusetts, where it proved a viable concept
- It's not "socialized" medicine (insurers and private hospitals are the main providers)
- Healthcare has obvious market failures (adverse selection, increasing returns, that is premiums fall with larger pools)
- The status quo has obvious disadvantages: US healthcare nearly twice as costly as most other advanced nation, whilst not delivering better outcomes and leaving tens of millions uninsured.
Considering the extraordinary hostility (I really became interested when when the US govt. was shut down and there was a serious threat of debt default with possibly catastrophic consequences, that didn't seem rational to me), some really raw nerve must have been touched, but which one?
What's so terrible of trying to insure uninsured people? (9M and counting)? Like any law, it creates some winners and losers, but as is becoming increasingly clear, the total winnings are likely to far exceed the losing.