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Once again, New England Rules







Yet another national map plotting out the stupid versus the…well…not so stupid. This one maps out the rate at which people have signed up for insurance since Obamacare went into effect. This map does not fit comfortably within the typical pattern, mostly due to the fact that some of the Northern states have right wing governors (think Wisconsin and poor Maine, which suffered again from its propensity to vote for independents). But the pattern is nonetheless broadly consistent, with three New England states (including Connecticut) in the top five. Massachusetts was excluded from the sweepstakes, because Romneycare has been in effect there for years, so people were already signed up.

One surprise, the state of Kentucky, which led the league in one area of stupid (smoking), scores in the top five. Again, this has to do with the governor involved, because the people of Kentucy had the (for them) unusual good sense to elect a Democratic governor, who has enthusiastically embraced the law and signed up massive numbers of people. By the way, this means that McConnell must navigate his way through a right wing anti-Obamacare minefield in order to get renominated, and then, if the Democrats have any sense, a barrage of commercials featuring Kentuckians complaining that McConnell wants to take away their health care.

On a slightly different note, but still on the subject of right wing stupid, Paul Krugman notes that the same math whizzes that brought us the Romney presidential victory are proving mathematically that people are not signing up for Obamacare. With enemies like them, who needs friends?

Caveat: All of this does not mean I think that Obamacare is a good system. It is better than what we had, but it is yet another example of taking a Rube Goldberg approach to solving our problems, always with the unspoken objective of shoving money toward the 1%. No that's not fair to .99 percent of us. Make that shoving money toward the .01%.


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