Latest victim of #Obamacare: …New York cultural mavens? Is the man MAD?

(Via @EWErickson) Remember, we must be careful not to gratuitously grind these people’s faces in the dirt over their problems:

Many in New York’s professional and cultural elite have long supported President Obama’s health care plan. But now, to their surprise, thousands of writers, opera singers, music teachers, photographers, doctors, lawyers and others are learning that their health insurance plans are being canceled and they may have to pay more to get comparable coverage, if they can find it.

They are part of an unusual informal health insurance system that has developed in New York in which independent practitioners were able to get lower insurance rates through group plans, typically set up by their professional associations or chambers of commerce. That allowed them to avoid the sky-high rates in New York’s individual insurance market, historically among the most expensive in the country.

…Why? Because of people like lawyer Barbara Meinwald, Manhattan lawyer who was already paying 10K/yr for insurance before, but will now have to pay 15K/yr for worse coverage. Turns out the government decided to drag all those people to the individual market in order to get the healthy ones paying into the exchanges (and thus avoid an exchange death spiral), and Ms. Meinwald gets to go along for the ride.  Her reaction?

It is not lost on many of the professionals that they are exactly the sort of people – liberal, concerned with social justice – who supported the Obama health plan in the first place. Ms. Meinwald, the lawyer, said she was a lifelong Democrat who still supported better health care for all, but had she known what was in store for her, she would have voted for Mitt Romney.

…I can work with that. It’s not optimal – I’d prefer that Ms. Meinwald was now hanging a Gadsden Flag in her coop window and threatening to enter unto a blood feud with the Democratic party for the next five generations – but she’s definitely moving in the direction that I want her to go.  And if stories like this are showing up in the New York Times, of all places, then it’s very bad for the administration right now. Watching the entire edifice collapse under its own weight, in my opinion, is worth not gloating too much during the process*.

And if that doesn’t persuade you… well, there’s always the Golden Rule. I know, I know: dirty pool.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Basically, just enough so that people remember that we’re there. Fortunately, the GOP really invested in the We absolutely HATE Obamacare brand.