Lessons from the Obamacare ‘Horror Stories’


The Wire has the story Lessons from the Obamacare ‘Horror Stories’.

At the root of every debunked, cancelled plan, Obamacare “horror story” is usually a person who isn’t as informed as he or she would like to believe. Usually that person is a journalist. Last week Maggie Mahar at HealthInsurance.org debunked yet another horror story, but she didn’t blame the misguided former policy holders so much as the journalist who wrote the story. “It appeared that no one at the Star-Telegram even attempted to run a background check on the sources, or fact check their stories,” Mahar wrote. “I couldn’t help but wonder: ‘Why?'”

The article goes on to detail some of the stories that may have started out as horror stories, but ended up actually being successes for Obamacare.

The Daily Kos reference to the above article in its post Obamacare horror story, chose the following quote:

What makes it a horror story is that when the Star Telegram learned that Johnson actually was able to get coverage, they did nothing to change their original report, even though it was at best incomplete. As Maggie Mahar, who wrote the post linked above, puts it:

This major daily’s nearly 200,000 daily readers saw the story that would lead them to believe that Americans who received cancellation notices were “left in limbo.” Most, it concluded, would wind up uninsured – or paying more than they could afford.  As I’ve pointed out many times – and as more and more coverage is revealing – the opposite is true.


You probably have to do your own research to see if the original story is right, the debunker is right, or there is some other choice I can’t imagine.

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