Why Were So Many Newpaper and Magazine Articles So Strongly in Favor of Obamacare?

Even allowing for the normal leftward tilt of most news media, the unrestrained enthusiasm for the Affordable Care Act caught me by surprise at first.

I thought I had it figured out.  Newspaper writers, at heart, mostly want to be the next great American author.  Think Ernest Hemingway, reprised. Of course, most or our current reporters don't have Hemingway's courage and are unlikely to leave their newspaper desk and head off to front lines of some war raging in, say, Africa.  In fact, they are unlikely to abandon any job that then puts then outside of the boundaries of that critical corporate fringe benefit, Health Insurance.  Looking around the newsroom at a great many empty desks and noting the declining circulation numbers on the bulletin board must surely strike fear into many hearts.  "What will I do for health insurance, if I get the axe next?"

And that, I decided, meant that mandatory issue and subsidized premiums would be pushed by the media, with any thoughts of conflict of interest swiftly swept under the rug.

But I had never really thought about the large number of journalists that already function as freelancers.    And clearly, the Obama Administration never had either!  As the tiny minority of (a few million) people in the Individual Marketplace began receiving their cancellation notices for existing policies, a surprising number have turned out to be writers who had already (voluntarily or involuntarily) taken the plunge into the freelance pool.  And, damn!  Some of them are pretty good writers.

Bruce Barcott, in this article published in The New York Observer, might not be Hemingway - but he can sure tell a story.  The article is worth reading in its entirety just to get to the accountant/lawyer's description of how to supply a correct "monthly income" on the Washington State ACA Exchange.

For these writers, already in the Individual Marketplace, a great fear has been cancellation.  And now, as Nancy Pelosi hoped, we have found out what was in the bill.