One anecdote is all it takes

   “Yeah, well I heard . . .”

   Four words just about sum up vast seas of political insight about matters that matter.

    “I heard about the schools handing out condoms.”

    “I heard about the Black Panthers intimidating voters.”

    “I heard that illegal immigrants can get Medicaid.”

     It hardly matters if the “I heard” is true, or if it is a speck of truth blown up into an asteroid. It only matters that “I heard.”

     Jon Stewart recently went nose-to-noise with Fox News for casting a net of generalities as wide as a continent based on one interview with a beach bum who said he bought lobster with food stamps. Stewart congratulated Fox News for “finding your food-stamp abuse Bigfoot.”     He then ridiculed the network for assuring appalled viewers that the nation is awash with comparable atrocities.

     Of course, all it takes is one anecdote to affirm all that a target audience wants to believe. You know, the old Reagan-era “welfare Cadillac” ploy.

   In his Bush-era book on red-state America, Deer Hunting With Jesus, Joe Bageant ruminates on that alleged welfare luxury car. A man of the heartland, he grieves to see that the intellectual lives of a vast sea of Americans “exist on things that sound as if they might be true.”

   The better, he says, for moneyed interests to blunt anything, like health coverage for the working poor, that might benefit those whose labors are so commonly exploited.

   Speaking of anecdotes, you might have heard what a disaster the Affordable Care Act is, based on a claim like the one made by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio in December — that based on the cancellations of policies deemed inadequate under the Affordable Care Act, more people had lost insurance because of the ACA than had acquired it.

  That was false then. It’s particularly ridiculous now, as ACA opponents continue to cite it.

   In January, long before the glitches of healthcare.gov were resolved and enrollment started to ramp up, a Washington Post analysis laid bare Rubio’s falsehood.

   The low-hanging fruit of rebuttal, explained the Post’s Glenn Kessler, was the 3.9 million Americans who gained health coverage in states that expanded Medicaid.

   Some people are challenging the 4.2 million signups attributed to ACA by mid-March. They wondered how many of these people were previously insured or had to switch because their companies dropped them.

  The response to this is that movement is movement. Before the progress of the last three months, at the dawn of a new year, the rate of uninsured in this country dropped from 17.1 percent to 15.9 percent. We await Sen. Rubio’s statement.

   “Well, I heard that because of Obamacare, full-time jobs have been lost to part-time jobs.”

   Not true, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As of February, the nation had added 2 million full-time jobs over the previous year, while the number of part-time jobs declined by 230,000.

    Americans for Prosperity, a political hit squad funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, has targeted key 2014 races by trotting out horrifying tales attributed to the ACA.

    In one advertisement, a leukemia patient declares that her coverage was canceled because of ACA and the new policy will have out-of-pocket costs that put her life in danger.

   Well, not exactly. The Post’s Kessler found that because of subsidies, the woman will have lower premiums under ACA than before, which would more than cancel out her out-of-pocket costs. 

   One would think that in a nation awash with the desolation and despair from “Obamacare,” a pair of honest barkers like the Koch brothers would be able to find one example that would survive a rudimentary fact check.

   But, then, legitimate horrors are not necessary when all it takes is “Well, I heard . . .” For as we all know, Bigfoot is out there.

    Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

So they took a second job

    As the deadline nears for coverage under the Affordable Care Act, two types of hardworking Americans should be furious.

    First: the working-poor millions who would be covered under expanded Medicaid if their state’s policy makers didn’t refuse it.

    Second: the millions who work second jobs mostly to pay for health coverage. That includes the 61-year-old who sacrificed most of his knee cartilage to a career hanging sheet rock. He now drags himself from shelf to shelf in a big-box retailer that, like his prior employers, doesn’t do health coverage.

    Second jobs were the story in the March 10 Time. In this case, it was about an amazing group of nerds who spent months away from home and from high-dollar roles in Silicon Valley.

    Their job: to nurse the crippled ACA web site to functionality.

    Read Steven Brill’s story about these info commandos, assembled from across the country and led by a T-shirted Google troubleshooter named Mikey (yes, Mikey) Dickerson, and you’ll root, root, root for the home team.

    That is, unless you wished, wished, wished that it all came crashing down, and you are still wishing.

    In that case, I’m sorry to report that healthcare.gov and the state exchanges have secured health coverage for more than 4 million. Terrible news, I know.

    Oh, it looked deliciously horrible at first. As the astronauts said in The Right Stuff, it looked like this administration “screwed the pooch” when contractors rushed healthcare.gov to the launch pad without a sufficient test run.

    Enter last October a steely band of super geeks, who would alternately understate their heroics and fully understand the stakes before them.

    Allusions to the hyper-risk of space travel are sprinkled throughout Brill’s account:

     “This is just a website. We’re not going to the moon,” Dickerson tells his cohorts.

     An “Apollo 13 moment,” is how administration point man Jeff Zients describes the dramatic effort to rescue the site.

    Throughout, these people are driven by the only option available: Yes, it will work; it has to work.

    They face bitter frustration, with system crashes at the worst possible time — like while lawmakers are hammering Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Capitol Hill.

    Finally, against a swarm of setbacks, the task force turns the tide.

    Two days before Christmas, a site that limped along for months takes off “like a rocket ship.” That day healthcare.gov sees 129,000 enrollments.

    Along with these numbers, Time reports response times cut from eight seconds in October to half a second in January.

   All of this is to say that, well, nothing has changed for those who wish this landmark never happened. And nothing has changed for those whose states have left them hanging, in some cases their very lives swaying in political winds.

   The advent of this law comes with more than your basic, Fox News-generated animus. A lot of people are about to be inflamed because they ignored the law and will get penalized at tax time.

   Key point: Many of these people get money back from the government via the Earned Income Tax Credit. For playing roulette with their health care, possibly taxing us all with emergency room visits, unfortunately they will get less of that tax credit.

   This is a tender moment for a nation. A lot of feelings are inflamed. I liken it to what happens with heart surgery. It comes with pain, disorientation, slow healing and, presumably, a new regimen, a new reality.

   Pain: Though subsidies are going to mean health policies that will be better and lower-cost than many imagined, some people will pay more and get less. This is exactly the price of having a public-private contrivance rather than following the Medicare model.

   Disorientation: What is to come? Steven Brill ends his article by asking as much.

   “The website works. Will Obamacare work?”

    Answer: Yes, it will work; it has to work.

    Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Bazookas and the founding fathers

  Principle.

  The NFL hinted it would move the Super Bowl, and Apple said it could find a new place for a planned plant if Arizona legitimized discrimination most foul, most un-American, against gays and lesbians.

   In a similarly principled stand, arms maker Magpul Industries has moved its plant to Wyoming.

   The principle in question? People shouldn’t have to reload so often at target practice.

   Colorado, site of much rapid-firearm horror, was Magpul’s home until recently. Last year when lawmakers there deliberated a ban on magazines of 15 rounds or more, Magpul threatened to bolt. Unmoved, the governor and lawmakers said, “Enjoy the scenery upon exiting.”

   Opponents of a limit on such rapid-fire efficiency said this wasn’t about sporting efficiency. It was about self-protection.

   Let’s say a pack of, oh, a dozen burglars invaded one’s home. A box of 10-round clips wouldn’t do the trick. Any law-abiding American defending his home would be defenseless. It happens all the time. In Colorado we were to imagine these herd burglaries run amok.

    Funny. Not really, but when Erik Larson, in his book Lethal Passage, a portrait of the gun industry, asked a gun merchant to explain the function of high-capacity magazines, the man shrugged and said that it’s about having to reload at the range. After all, he said, “You’re paying by the hour for range time.”

    That wasn’t Adam Lanza’s concern when he mowed down first-graders and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary with a 30-round Magpul mag.

    A young gunman who killed three students at Chardon, Ohio, in 2012 wished he’d had a sweet 30-rounder on him, because when pursued by a brave football coach, he failed to reload after 10.

    But, wait: Consider this interesting rationale. One of the wise Republicans who does the gun lobby’s bidding in the Colorado General Assembly said, “Maybe it was a good thing” that theater shooter James Holmes had a 100-round magazine in his possession, because after he killed 12 and wounded 58, it jammed. See? Only 70 lives shattered.

    So much for unthinkable rationalizations. What about the one that this firepower is what the founders wanted? A civilian population armed like just any military or police force to protect its freedom.

    I hear this rationale, and I wonder why, then, just anyone can’t have a mortar, a submachine gun, a Stinger missile for plunking targets at the range. (OK, too time-consuming to reload; on the clock, you know.) Face it: The founders would have blanched at the thought.

   Instances in which lives were saved because a gunman had to reload are plentiful. Instances in which high-capacity weapons actually did what the gun lobby says justifies them are so rare as to be of pink elephant stock.

    Convenience, convenience. A burrito from the microwave. A Slurpee from the tap. A gun that fires unlimited rounds and can be bought like a scratch-off.

   If we were to hew to the wishes of the gun lobby, such transactions would be uncontrolled, as too many are.

    Colorado’s lawmakers refused to accept that. Last year they instituted universal background checks for firearms in addition to the magazine limit.

   Subsequently, the gun lobby harnessed the power of low-turnout politics and picked off two state senators with recalls. Score one for convenience.

   Not everyone is resigned to these matters. On March 13-16, faith communities across the country will show their alarm about national trends with the Gun Violence Sabbath Weekend.

   Sounds like so much talk. But when gun merchants and their policy-making caddies talk loudest, it would seem imperative that someone else offer a counterpoint.

    Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.