Krugman- The Obamacare Disinformation Loop

Over the past few weeks I’ve been watching a real-time demonstration of how American voters come to be misinformed about key policy issues. Yes, it’s Obamacare again.

Here’s how it played: some insurance companies began filing requests for large increases in the premiums for individual plans. Now, anyone who reads Charles Gaba knows that such filings need to be taken with huge helpings of salt: there were similar stories last year, and it turned out both that approved increases were much smaller than requests and that the companies asking for big raises were outliers; overall, premiums rose very little.

Nonetheless, my inbox began filling up with right-wing attacks on the mainstream media for covering up the truth about skyrocketing Obamacare costs, and this pressure campaign had its effect: soon, scare stories about a looming disaster began popping up.

And then more numbers began coming in, and sure enough, the whole thing is looking like a false alarm.

So will there be big headlines about Obamacare not costing that much, after all, and how the earlier reports were misleading? Hahaha.

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http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/the-obamacare-disinformation-loop/