The New York Times is starting to get a bit nervous about this health care law thing.

Ginger Chapman and her husband, Doug, are sitting on the health care cliff.
The cheapest insurance plan they can find through the new federal marketplace in New Hampshire will cost their family of four about $1,000 a month, 12 percent of their annual income of around $100,000 and more than they have ever paid before.

Even more striking, for the Chapmans, is this fact: If they made just a few thousand dollars less a year — below $94,200 — their costs would be cut in half, because a family like theirs could qualify for federal subsidies.

So much so that they’re now gingerly starting to tell their readers what you and I already know: “While the act clearly[*] benefits those at the low end of the income scale — and rich people can continue to afford even the most generous plans — people like the Chapmans are caught in the uncomfortable middle: not poor enough for help, but not rich enough to be indifferent to cost.” I welcome this sudden decision by the New York Times to join us here in Reality Non-Unicorn, and hope that they enjoy their visit. Indeed, the Old Grey Lady is more than welcome to settle here permanently.

But – again – what’s happening to the Chapman is not a bug in the system. It is the system. The idea behind Obamacare’s health care ‘plan’ was to transfer wealth from the middle class to the poor, the healthy to the sick, and from the young to the old. It was simply couched as an ‘and everybody will have lower health care costs and better service!’ program because there was (and is!) no politically viable way to sell ‘higher premiums, higher deductibles, and fewer doctors’ to the middle class. And President Obama’s stop-gap measure of offering access to horrible insurance to make up for Obamacare taking away the perfectly fine insurance people already had isn’t really going to help matters either. Not in the country, not at the voting booth.

Oh, and by the way: NO REPUBLICAN VOTED FOR OBAMACARE.

Via @tedcruz.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*It is not, in point of fact, clear that locking more people into Medicaid benefits those people. And I am being polite in my statement, there: the system defaults to helping to keep poor people poor, and possessed of inferior health care. Remember, the Democratic party loves poor people; that’s why it tries to make as many of them as possible.