How Red States Are Holding Back Obamacare

The New Republic ^ | January 19, 2014 | Jonathan Cohn

[2ndDivisionVet]

Everybody knows that red state officials aren’t enthusiastic about Obamacare. Some of them are even trying to undermine it. But are they succeeding? Are they actually holding back the law? Here are two reasons to think the answer is yes—one somewhat ambiguous, one very clear.

The first—the ambiguous one—is some information that became a little more than a week ago, when the federal government released new information about the people enrolling in private Obamacare insurance plans. The data doesn’t reveal a lot of things. It doesn’t say how many people have actually paid premiums, for example. And it doesn’t say how many people had insurance before. But it does break down the numbers by state. For each one, plus the District of Columbia, you can see exactly how many people have signed up for a private insurance plan through one of the new marketplaces.

Analysts at the Kaiser Family Foundation have since taken those numbers, state by state, and compared them to the number of people eligible to get private insurance through the marketplaces. The result, in each case, is a percentage—the proportion of eligible residents who have signed up for private Obamacare plans. The analysts at Kaiser, a carefully non-partisan foundation, didn't take into account state political environments. The graph below, which I constructed, does.

Of the ten states that have the higher percentages, eight are solidly “blue,” in the sense that they voted for the Democratic president in the last three presidential elections....

[Gene Eric]

Actually, it’s likely the states with larger percentages of enrollment were responsible for terminating existing plans thereby forcing folks onto Obamacare.

[Biggirl]

Which I strongly doubt she will, again the daugther keep an eye on.

[gitmo]

The graph indicates an inverse correlation between the intelligence of the voters and the likelihood of falling for the Obamacare scam.

That makes sense.

[yorkiemom]

“This whole labeling thing needs to be reversed to label the commie/fascist/socialist states as “Red”.”

I went to the Reagan Library last month. The maps of his elections had the blue states Republican, the red states deems. That color scheme was more accurate, for the reasons you stated. I don’t remember when it changed, but I’m sure the socialists and media were behind it.