| No Images? Click here   On Friday, House Republicans pulled the American Health Care Act -- the bill they had hoped would replace Obamacare -- from consideration. There have been oodles of analysis pieces of the failure of "Trumpcare" in the days since. But the best way to really understand how Obamacare works (and doesn't) and why Trumpcare failed to displace it is to read a piece published last week: Jonathan Cohn's profile of two families on either side of Obamacare's most important divide. We interviewed Cohn about the piece. How did this story come about? How'd you come up with the idea? As soon as Donald Trump won the election, and the prospect of repeal suddenly became very real, I started searching for people whom the Affordable Care Act had affected directly. My hope was that by telling the stories of living, breathing humans, I could convey the stakes of the debate in a way that mere statistics could not. I wanted to write something that would illustrate the complicated trade-offs of health policy -- and the extent to which the parts of the law everybody liked were tied to the parts that had caused such disruption and anger. I went out of my way to report this article in one of the states where the new markets were really struggling. North Carolina had come up in my reporting before, because premiums had gotten so high and most of the state was left with one insurer, so it seemed like an obvious place to go. What most surprised you while reporting this story? I had interviewed several families frustrated or angry over what the law had meant for their coverage, and eventually settled on the Gibbs family because they seemed eager to talk about their situation -- and also because, logistically, they were easy to add on my itinerary. But for all of their frustrations, they weren’t angry at the law -- or the Democrats. In fact, they mentioned they had voted for Hillary Clinton. And they went out of their way to say they believed in the idea of universal coverage. I suspect that made them somewhat unusual among people who have ended up paying so much more for their health insurance. But in interviewing other people who were truly angry about Obamacare -- yes, even the Trump voters -- I was struck by how many of them said they, too, thought it was important to cover everybody. They wanted protection for people with pre-existing conditions, and financial assistance for people who couldn’t afford it in their own. This feeling wasn’t universal, and there were certainly some who quite plainly felt otherwise. But polling backs up my impression, which is that most people believe in what the Affordable Care Act has tried to accomplish. They are simply unhappy with the price it’s extracted. Of course, the point of the article is that the good stuff and the bad stuff are closely related -- that if you’re going to expand coverage, somebody is going to have to pay more. But there are different ways of achieving that, certainly. What was the hardest part of reporting, writing, or editing this piece? The hardest part of reporting stories like this is typically the “casting” -- finding people whose experiences provide the material necessary for what you want to write. In this particular case, finding a family dependent on the ACA for coverage wasn’t that difficult, because people on the frontlines of this fight -- everybody from the social workers at community clinics to organizers at political groups -- had begun collecting stories, and making contact information available to reporters like me. Finding a family frustrated with the ACA turned out to be a bit more challenging, just because nobody was organizing them. My solution was to try insurance brokers and see if they could put me in touch with their clients. I found Rick Ramey through Google and he did just that. He also gave a terrific interview -- one in which, I thought, he explained almost perfectly the law’s trade-offs and why it was so difficult for people to grasp them. I ended up using that in the article, too. I did my best to verify the details independently. That meant, first, getting documentation and secondary sources who could vouch for what the two families were telling me were telling me. In addition, I ran the details of their stories by a pair of health care experts -- Cynthia Cox and Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation -- just to makes sure it all sounded roughly consistent with what we know about how Obamacare affects different kinds of people. Did you learn anything that could help other writers or reporters do their jobs better? Yes -- if you are working on a feature, and you’ve finished your reporting, write it up as quickly as you can. I actually met the Gibbs family and the Secrists back in December, as part of a week-long reporting trip I took right before the holidays. I took a few days off to spend time with my family and had intended to write the feature immediately afterward. But I put it aside to work on some short-term writing. That was a big mistake, because by early January I was knee-deep in day-to-day coverage, with no way to carve out the long blocks of time I needed to write a feature-length piece. It wasn’t until late February I finally picked it back up again and, of course, not until the middle of March that the article finally appeared. Anything else you think readers should know? I still have unused material, and I am still hoping to use it. Although the debate over the American Health Care Act is over, the debate over health care policy is not. The ACA has real problems, and they might get worse, particularly if Trump refuses to attend to them in the way Obama did. So stay tuned for more coverage. Want to know more? Read the story.       Trump and Politics
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Sunday, March 26, 2017
Why Trumpcare failed
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