October 9

As Election Day approaches, President Obama and his allies have been repeating a common refrain on the campaign trail and in the mainstream media that the Affordable Care Act is “working.” In his speech at Northwestern University last week, President Obama said that, “while good, affordable health care might seem like a fanged threat to the freedom of the American people on Fox News, it turns out it’s working pretty well in the real world.” Vox’s Ezra Klein similarly accused Republicans of trying to paint Obamacare in a bad light in his piece entitled “In conservative media, Obamacare is a disaster.  In the real world, it’s working.” And in an embarrassingly fawning piece in Rolling Stone magazine, New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman had nothing but praise for the president – and Obamacare in particular – saying, “here we are, most of the way through the first full year of reform’s implementation, and it’s working better than even the optimists expected.”