Wednesday, September 24, 2014

In conservative media, Obamacare is a disaster. In the real world, it’s working.

Ezra Kline explains, In conservative media, Obamacare is a disaster. In the real world, it’s working. "This is the problem in the debate about Obamacare. The two sides live in different informational universes."

It's easy to give people a skewed impression of Obamacare without ever running a false story. The Affordable Care Act is a huge law, and at any given moment, there are some good things happening in it and some bad things happening in it. If you run multiple articles every day on the problems and nothing on the broader trends, it's easy to mislead your audience.

Recently, one of the major insurers pulled out of the Minnesota exchange. The news received huge play in the conservative media. The story is real — and it's bad news for Minnesotans. It's just not representative of the overall trend towards increased exchange participation. But a lot of conservative readers don't know that. The Daily Caller, for instance, hit the Minnesota story hard. But on Tuesday, they managed to report on Burwell's remarks without even mentioning the new data she presented on rising insurer participation.

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