Even Evangelicals Sorta Kinda Like Obamacare Now

<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-67992p1.html?cr=00&pl=edit-00">michael rubin</a> / <a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/?cr=00&pl=edit-00">Shutterstock.com</a>

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Attendees at this year’s Values Voter Summit, the annual DC conference sponsored by the evangelical Family Research Council, have been among the most fervent opponents of President Obama’s health care reform law. Some of the groups currently suing the Department of Health and Human Services over the law’s requirement that health insurers cover contraception are on hand as exhibitors and panel discussion members. But even here, many attendees I interviewed Friday had to admit that now that the law had survived the Supreme Court and was starting to take effect, there were parts of Obamacare they not only liked, but which had already helped family members or people they knew.

Wes Cantrell, visiting from Atlanta, is no fan of Obamacare. He thinks it should mostly be repealed. Except for the part that’s allowing his his grandson to stay on his parents’ insurance plan while he’s in college. “That’s good,” he concedes. Cantrell also admits that the ban on denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions ought to be spared. I didn’t get a chance to explain that keeping the bit about preexisting conditions would be impossible without the individual mandate (the law’s requirement that people buy health insurance or pay a fine), which will force lots of young healthy people into the system to subsidize the sicker people.

Another attendee, a doctor from Maryland who refused to give his name, told me that he had a sibling who got care for a very serious illness thanks to the new law. “That’s a positive thing,” he admitted. Even so, like many people I spoke with, for the doctor, the benefits still didn’t outweigh what they see as the law’s primary flaw: the mandatory contraception coverage. “I object to the burden imposed on institutions to provide contraception for free,” the doctor said.

In the hotel hallway, I ran into a group of recent college graduates interning for the Family Research Council and asked them whether any of them were still on their parents’ insurance plans. The horrified looks on their faces suggested that except for the British guy, every single one of them was getting insurance from their folks—the major benefit so far of Obamacare, which allows young people to stay on their parents’ plans until the age of 26. They refused to talk about it and tried to pawn me off on some high school kids coming down the stairs.

What was perhaps most remarkable about the impact of Obamacare on its most fervent opponents was how little impact it had had on them. The most controversial part of the law, the individual mandate and the requirements for businesses to provide coverage, haven’t kicked in yet, so it’s still too early to say. But I didn’t talk to a single person at the summit who had been enslaved by the law, as opponents so often claimed would be the result. Most wouldn’t even be affected by the mandate or the business requirement. Obviously it’s not a very scientific sample. Values Voters skew old; they don’t need birth control. Many of the people I spoke with were already getting their health care from the government, including some young people from Liberty University who had military health coverage. (One guy from Liberty U. I spoke with was convinced that Obamacare was taking money out of his paycheck every month, until informed by a colleague that those withholdings were for Medicare.)

But for all of the angry freakouts by conservatives who have claimed that Obamacare was going to be the end of the world as they knew it and the triumph of socialism over freedom, not a single person I spoke with could offer up concrete evidence that Obamacare was now or would ever be ruining their lives. Bruce Jones, from Liverpool, NY, who is retired from the military and thus gets generous health benefits from the government, conceded that it might be hard for people to point to anything specific about the law that might be hurting them. The opposition, he says, “it’s more ideological now than anything real.” 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate