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New Data Proves ACA Made of Candy!

You’re sitting in an airplane, and you suddenly hear the pilot’s amplified and disembodied voice. Look, he says, we don’t have a cockpit in this thing, with all those dials and knobs and whatchamawhosit, and there’s no place for me to look out a window and see what’s in front of us, but don’t worry: I think I found a way to fly the plane from the rear lavatory, so fasten your seatbelts for takeoff.

The comparable what did he just say statement of the last week belongs to Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), the ranking member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, who released a report on December 31 under the title, “Debunking Republican Claims about Coverage Losses under the Affordable Care Act.” Let the record show that on December 31 I was muddling orange peels and wallowing in a bottle of medium-cheap rye to prepare for midnight, so points to Henry Waxman and his staff for putting in that day at work. Here’s how Waxman began to debunk the GOP, in a statement that appears at the bottom of the very first page:

While there is no central repository of data on insurance coverage in the individual market, the number of individuals who will lose individual coverage and be unable to renew pre-ACA coverage, enroll in subsidized coverage, or access a catastrophic plan is sure to be small.

A question: If you were going to establish new law and policy to profoundly alter a big part of the largest economy on earth, wouldn’t you want to have a central repository of data on the thing you were attempting to transform? Notwithstanding the likely limits of that data as a tool for reorganizing a society, wouldn’t you try to set up a way of measuring the thing you intended to manage? Apparently not, if you’re a member of Congress or the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Health care? Ah, man, we don’t have a central data thingie about that stuff.

Waxman’s report goes on to offer a long series of wishes and guesses, a projection about what’s “sure to” happen in the future. “Complete data on policy renewals and enrollment in new insurance plans are not yet available,” the report explains on page five, but the stoopid Republicans are lying if they say people are losing their health insurance policies. Shit, why wait for data? It’s totally enough to just assert it.

And in fact, it really is enough, because Waxman’s report quickly produced a fit of convenient stenography. “Stunning new report undermines central GOP Obamacare claim,” the Washington Post’s The Plum Line blog helpfully explained. Politician makes shit up; credulous journalist types shit up under a stark raving headline; the republic abides. To be sure, guest blogger George Zornick hedged his bet with a qualifier, deep in his post: “The report is somewhat speculative, of course, since there is no central repository of data on the individual health insurance market.” So, yes: if a politician makes shit up in the absence of data, it’s “somewhat speculative.”

But all of this is deeply unfair, my personal trademark. (Unfairness: TM Chris Bray 2014 FTW.) Democrats slinging raw invention and convenient speculation regarding the implementation of the Affordable Care Act are, after all, answering bullshit with bullshit. Look at, for a particularly sad example, the Daily Caller’s “official” declaration that the law had resulted in a net loss of insurance coverage. Again, you have to read three paragraphs deep to get to this Waxmanish declaration:

The Obama administration has yet to announce the final tally of full enrollments, which are only confirmed once customers have made their first payment, but Cato Institute health policy expert Michael Cannon warns that not all those who signed up will complete their purchases, potentially leaving the White House with an even lower bottom line.

It’s official, potentially, in the absence of data, that maybe . . . something.

Amazingly, we spend our days reading this kind of “news.”