Category: reason

About
125 to 150 protesters, largely police officers and their families
and friends, showed up at the town hall meeting in Franklin, New
Jersey tonight to demand the resignation of a Franklin councilmenan
who has been an outspoken critic of police abuse. Not in attendance
was the target of their ire, David Fanale, who instead attended the
city council meeting in Roxbury to complain about police there,
against whom he had filed an Internal Affairs (IA) complaint over
what he says was an illegal 2013 police stop.

When he felt that complaint hadn’t been treated fairly by the
Roxbury Police Department, Fanale turned to his personal Facebook
page to express his frustration, eventually posting an image of
Calvin peeing on the thin blue line. Someone shared the photo among
the law enforcement community, which proceeded to mobilize against
him. The local media
described the offending illustration (reproduced at right) as
Calvin “urinating on what’s become a symbol of police sacrifice.”
Yet for many people who have found themselves on the wrong side of
it, the thin blue line represents police corruption and police
complicity in corruption.

The local police union president, Nevin Mattessich, had no
problem using dead police officers and their families to get the
upper hand against Fanale, who as a councilman says he has not
shown police the deference they expect form elected officials.
“I’ve had widows who’ve lost their husbands who are officers in the
line of duty. I’ve had family members who’ve lost their sons and
daughters in the line of duty who’ve contacted me to express how
upset they were,” Mattesich told local TV station My 9, later
claiming Fanale’s oath involved promising to work with them.
 “Mr. Fanale took an oath to be impartial, to be fair and to
technically work with us and try to make Franklin better. What he’s
done here is he’s gained a tremendous amount of unnecessary
attention and he’s actually taking away from the Borough of
Franklin,” he said.

Other cops chimed in too to explain why they
thought Fanale was wrong. One retired New York City police officer
involved in the effort to target
Fanale told the Star-Ledger “everyone has the right to free
speech, but there are limitations to it.” It’s doubtful he or many
other officers would choose to apply that standard in limiting the
things union bosses say.  Given the monopoly on the legal use
of initiatory force police officers have, there’s a far stronger
case for limiting what union bosses can say about elected
officials, since it’s so easy for them to intimidate others, than
what elected officials can say about police officers.

While Fanale is an outspoken critic of police abuse who says
he’s commited to holding police accountably as a council man, his
votes so far have not been unusually anti-police. When the council
voted on a new patrol car for the Franklin Police Department,
Fanale says he voted for it. He did vote against funding a seatbelt
ticketing initiative. It’s hardly a record that threatens the gravy
train police officers have commandeered for themselves. “Their
belief is that no office holder, no elected official should oppose
the police,” says Fanale. He says the police union wants him and
another councilman removed from office because the two were “not
going to give them everything they want.” In fact pro-police
residents (largely retired cops) were pushing for Fanale’s removal
before the Calvin incident,
as early as March of this year, because of comments Fanale made
critical of police.

In an interview with Reason, Fanale said “a lot of stuff” was
going on with the Franklin Police Department and described two
incidents he’s focused on—in one a Franklin cop made a dangerous
U-Turn that led to a collision with a septuagenarian driver. Fanale
says the city refused to pay the driver’s $250 deductible from the
accident. In another, a Franklin cop ran into a pet store to save
some animals from a smoke-filled room. Fanale says the police union
called it an “inferno” but that there was no evidence of a fire.
Also unmentioned in the police union’s narrative of the hero cop is
that the cop now has a workers’ compensation claim from the
incident, which did not occur on duty or under orders.

Fanale says because of the attention focused on him by the law
enforcement community he’s seen death threats posted in online
comments, and even his home address.

Fanale ran for city council last year. He says the mayor,
multiple council members and even a state assemblywoman suggested
he run. He said he had the backing of the Republican party during
his run but was at the time already shifting toward a more
libertarian outlook on politics, driven by an interest in Ron
Paul’s 2012 campaign and subsequent involvement with the Campaign
for Liberty. He says he has no intention to resign. Some residents
say they want to recall him but by law that process can’t be
started until Fanale’s served a year in office. Fanale says he’s
learned that for cops, his freedom of speech ends “where their
feelings begin,” comparing police officers’ reaction to being
offended over the image he posted to what extremist jihadis do to
people and media outlets that publish image of Mohammed, which some
Muslims consider prohibited based on certain hadiths, or
recorded sayings of Mohammed.

Save one Brazilian goal, today’s
record breaking high scoring World Cup match between Germany and
Brazil (7-1) would’ve ended with a score resembling a low scoring
game of football. Nevertheless, aside from the Brazilian national
team’s ignominious  defeat—no country has ever lost so badly
in a semi-final and although Brazil has five world championships it
has for the second time failed to win at home—the tournament
appears to be going well, both on and off the field.

Reuters reports that the infrastructure problems
predicted before the start of the tournament have not materialized.
Neither have the
demonstrations seen across the country last summer, which were
sparked by a bus fare hike and sustained by protesters’ anger over
how much money the government was spending on the World Cup. Now
Brazil’s president, DIlma Rousseff could suffer in the polls, not
for her role in promoting government spending but because of the
Brazilian team’s failure to win.
Via Reuters:

Anger and disappointment were so intense that it threatened to
darken the national mood for some time to come, with possible
consequences for President Dilma Rousseff as she seeks a second
term in October.

“This is worse than 1950. It’s one thing to lose a game where
you suffered and fought hard, and it’s another to be completely
humiliated,” said Fernando Hazzan, 28, in Sao Paulo.

“This game is going down in history, too,” he said.

The Brazilian government
spent $11 billion on public works alone to host this year’s
World Cup, and is already preparing to spend even more ahead of the
2016 Summer Olympics to be held in Rio De Janeiro. Brazil will face
Argentina or the Netherlands in a match for third will be held in
Brasilia, the city the Brazil government built in the 1950s
specifically to be its capital, on Saturday.

Tonight’s
episode of The
Independents (Fox Business Network, 9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT,
with re-airs three hours later) begins with the story that for
weeks has swallowed The
Drudge Report whole: All those illegal immigrant kids
massed up in holding facilities near the U.S.-Mexico border.
Tamar Jacoby,
president of ImmigrationWorks USA, will break down the mechanics of
who is coming and going and why; and the subject will be debated by
Party Panelists Katie
Pavlich (co-host, Outnumbered)
and Emily Tisch Sussman
(campaign director, Center
for American Progress Action Fund). That duo is also slated to
discuss the themes in Pavlich’s new book,
Assault and Flattery: The Truth About the Left and Their War on
Women, and also Hillary Clinton’s latest comments about

political dynasties, and the city of Berkeley requiring medical
marijuana dispensaries to
give away two percent of their product to the poor.

Fox
News Middle Eastern specialist Lisa Daftari will discuss the
latest awfulness in Israel and Gaza, Manhattan
Institute Senior Fellow (and former Labor Department chief
economist) Diana Furchtgott-Roth
will break down the connection between welfare payments and
employment rates, and yours truly will talk about today’s bracing letter
to the Obama administration by 38 journalism/open-government groups
denouncing his record on transparency.

Online aftershow begins on http://ift.tt/QYHXdy
just after 10. Follow The Independents on Facebook at
http://ift.tt/QYHXdB,
follow on Twitter @ independentsFBN, tweet
during the show & we’ll use the best of ‘em. Click on this page
for more video of past segments.

This afternoon, New York
Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman announced that the
ridesharing app Uber has agreed
to cap its prices during emergencies in order to comply with the
state’s price gouging laws.

Schneiderman seems pretty pleased with himself, and he’s even
got a quote from a highly domesticated version of bad-boy Uber CEO
Travis Kalanick as a trophy in his press release. But Uber’s
customers and drivers should be pretty pissed off. 

Right now, Uber uses dynamic pricing to encourage drivers to
come out when demand is high or conditions are unappealing. The app
warns users that they will be paying higher prices and lets them
estimate the cost of their ride before clicking the button to
summon a car. But that kind of disclosure isn’t enough for New
York’s regulators.

According to
the press release: 

New York’s law against price gouging (General Business Law
§396-r), was passed in the winter of 1978-79 in response to
escalating heating oil prices.  It defines an “abnormal
disruption of the market” as “any change in the market, whether
actual or imminently threatened, resulting from stress of weather,
convulsion of nature, failure or shortage of electric power or
other source of energy, strike, civil disorder, war, military
action, national or local emergency, or other cause of an abnormal
disruption of the market which results in the declaration of a
state of emergency by the governor.”  During an abnormal
disruption of the market, all parties within the chain of
distribution of any essential consumer goods or services are
prohibited from charging “unconscionably excessive
prices.” 

What this means for New Yorkers: Assuming Uber doesn’t have a
behind-the-scenes plan to bump driver pay in times of crisis, fewer
drivers are going to heroically schlep out to the far reaches of
Brooklyn when it’s snowy or subway strike-y. That means customers
who would be willing to pay still can’t get a ride and drivers who
would be willing to work will stay at home instead.

Uber CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick said this, hinting at
broader implementation nationwide: 

“This policy intends to strike the careful balance between the
goal of transportation availability with community expectations of
affordability during disasters. Our collaborative solution with
Attorney General Schneiderman is a model for technology companies
and regulators in local, state and federal government.” 

Aw. So warm and fuzzy. To be fair, Kalanick was probably trying
to forestall a worse deal for his company and his customers in this
negotiation. 

But just as a reminder, here’s Kalanick
on regulators in 2012: 

“Every city we go to eventually the regulators will make
something up to keep us from rolling out or continuing our
 business,” he told an audience at TC Disrupt in San
Francisco….

Kalanick…waxed philosophical about what it is that drives
regulators in his industry specifically. “I have been trying
to understand the regulators,” he said, and he’d decided that they
work on three levels — none too good.

“One is cronyism,” he said. “They get a Stockholm Syndrome with
the folks they regulate… One even told me that they view themselves
as customer support for the taxi and livery companies.”

Number two: “If they don’t have rules they feel it is illegal,”
he said. This is the knee-jerk, err-on-the-side-of-caution approach
that Uber has currently been fighting.

Number three will sound familiar to anyone who has covered
regulation in many other areas, like technology: “They are
incredibly sensitive to what’s the public view, the optics rather
than the reality,” Kalanick said. 

Sigh.

Bonus: Here’s the super-simple system Uber will be expected to
use to determine a fair price during emergencies, as described in
the
agreement:

Clear as mud. 

Washington’s first state-licensed marijuana
store, Top
Shelf Cannabis in Bellingham,
opened at 8 a.m. today, followed by a handful of other shops in
Seattle, Spokane, Kelso, and Prosser. They are among the 25 businesses that

received retail licenses from the Washington State Liquor
Control Board (LCB) yesterday. Most of them were not quite ready to
start selling pot today, but some may open later this week or
month. The LCB intends to award a total of 334 retail licenses
statewide, although that plan looks iffy in light of temporary or
permanent bans adopted by nearly 100 cities and counties.

The first customer at Top Shelf was Cale Holdsworth, a visitor
from Kansas who bought two grams for $26.50—quite a bargain
compared to the steep prices expected due to a
shortage of legal pot. By contrast, the Seattle Post-
Intelligencer
reports that Deborah Greene, the first customer at Cannabis
City, Seattle ‘s first (and so far only) recreational pot shop,
paid $160 for four grams, more than twice as much per gram. The
paper’s cannabis correspondent, Jake Ellison, predicts that typical
prices at state-licensed outlets will range from $15 to $25 per
gram, a lot more than what their illegal and quasi-legal
competitors are charging. 

Until the LCB develops rules for edibles this fall, Washington’s
stores will be selling
buds only, and they won’t have much to sell. The LCB started
licensing growers in March. So far, according to a list
it posted today, it has granted just 86 applications, with more
than 2,500 others still pending. In addition to the shortage of
legal growers, high taxes and and regulatory costs are pushing
prices up.

Although customers lined up today for the novelty of
buying legal pot, the new shops probably will have a hard time

competing with dispensaries and black-market dealers. “My old
supplier just texted me,” Deborah Greene, Cannabis City’s first
buyer,
told The Seattle Times. “[He]
said, ‘I saw you on TV. Now I know why you’re not calling
me.'” She may have been joking, but a lot will hinge on whether
that anecdote sounds plausible a year from now.

“Zero tolerance” school
policies are rightly despised by libertarians, who see perfectly
well-behaved children being harshly punished for harmless mistakes
and inoffensive behavior—such as accidentally bringing a
tackle box to school or
folding a piece of paper into a vague gun-like shape.

Lawmakers in some states are smartly easing up on the
codification of such policies, which force school districts to
suspend and even expel students over trivial slights. Even the
Obama administration has recommended reducing them.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration has also instructed
schools to stop disciplining students at all if such punishments
have a “disparate impact” on minority students. According to the
U.S. Department of Justice Office of Civil Rights Division’s
“Dear
Colleague” letter from earlier this year:

The administration of student discipline can result in unlawful
discrimination based on race in two ways: first, if a student is
subjected to different treatment based on the student’s race, and
second, if a policy is neutral on its face—meaning that the policy
itself does not mention race—and is administered in an evenhanded
manner but has a disparate impact, i.e., a disproportionate and
unjustified effect on students of a particular race. …

Schools also violate Federal law when they evenhandedly
implement facially neutral policies and practices that, although
not adopted with the intent to discriminate, nonetheless have
an unjustified effect of discriminating against students on
the basis of race.

The letter was poorly received by many education experts. For
one thing, it’s actually quite vague. Who determines whether a
disparate impact is “justified?” Surely it will be difficult for
teachers to maintain classroom order if punishing children for
actual misbehavior could trigger a civil rights lawsuit under the
“disparate impact” philosophy.

Nevertheless, Dr. Andre Perry wrote in
The Washington Post yesterday that the letter has the
right idea:

The real reason to stop expulsions is that, in the noble cause
of closing the black-white achievement gap, schools are insidiously
giving up on black children by expelling those who are considered
not ready to learn. While zero-tolerance expulsions myopically help
the school and the majority of students in it, they destroy the
student — and, ultimately, the community, too.

Zero-tolerance policies have many allies. Parents are often the
most ardent supporters. (If a kid injured your son or daughter,
you’d want expulsion, too.) Moreover, teachers and principals will
tell you that ridding the school of disruptive behaviors
accelerates achievement for the overwhelming majority of its
students. Educational leaders embrace no-tolerance policies on the
ground that they provide the greatest good for the greatest number.
…

That doesn’t mean Obama’s conceit is flawless.
It is important for schools to be able to
credibly threaten reprisals for the malcontents. Some
behaviors do warrant out-of-school time: Weapons
and schools don’t mix. Fighting may require separating a child from
the school to assess and calm a situation.

I get the sense that Perry is lumping many different policies
together under the banner of zero tolerance. Schools should stop
kicking kids out of class for dumb reasons—the quintessential
example is the “chewed
Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun” incident. All students should
be safe from this kind of nonsense, regardless of their skin
color.

It’s a little more problematic for the federal government to
broadly mandate that school districts move away from all
punishments that have a “disparate impact” on racial minorities,
however. For instance, suppose a school maintained a policy of
suspending students who were late to class three times. If that
policy impacted one racial group more than another, it could run
into trouble with OCR, even if it was enforced “evenhandedly”
against anyone who violated it.

Now, I happen to agree that school administrators use the
weapons of suspension and expulsion all too readily. That reality
is particularly harmful to minorities, as Perry points out. But
broad federal recommendations against all rules that cause
disparate impact seem likely to erode local autonomy and could
provoke unintended consequences, such as toxic classroom
environments.

In short, zero tolerance policies are bad, willy-nilly
expulsions are bad, abjectly racial policies are bad—but federal
education mandates are also (often) bad.

• About that “eradicated” smallpox… A
  
  few forgotten vials of the stuff were found in an unused storage
  room at the National Institutes of Health. Whoops.
• President Obama is
  getting the business for his deer-caught-in-headlights response
  to the influx of tens of thousand of unaccompanied immigrant
  children in recent months.
• 
  Sarah Palin wants to impeach President Obama, which might mean
  something if she held a seat anyplace other than news shows.
• Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Hillary Clinton are the
  leading contenders for their parties’ respective presidential
  nominations, the latest poll says.
• Paul is also teaming up with Sen Cory Booker (D-N.J.) on a
  proposal to
  make criminal sentencing around the country less
  draconian.
• Customer
  cheers greeted the first legal marijuana sale in Washington
  state. Tight regulations keep the price sky high, so black market
  dealers shouldn’t lose too much sleep yet.
• Libertarian candidates show strength
  in roughly seven Senate races this year. North Carolina’s Sean
  Haugh
  polls between 8 and 11 percent.

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Eden Foods is an organic food business that’s
been operating out of Michigan since the 1960s. Eden’s president
and sole shareholder, Michael Potter, is anti-GMO,
pro-macrobiotic diet, and believes in “full transparency–complete
disclosure of ingredients and all handling” for Eden’s products,
which include things like mung beans, buckwheat noodles, plum
vinegar, and dried sea vegetables. It’s not unfair to describe the
company as exactly what conservatives would dream up if they were
parodying an organic foods brand—except for one thing:
Potter is a Roman Catholic who says certain forms of
birth control are abortion.

Potter’s lawsuit against the Health and Human
Services contraception mandate is one of three that the
U.S. Supreme Court has ordered to be reviewed in wake of
its June 30 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. Of
course, these three case are just the tip of the proverbial
iceberg, Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes. Nearly 100 lawsuits against
the mandate are pending, state legislatures are getting involved,
and the White House is also threatening action. But this
controversy only exists because the government has made birth
control, and all sorts of health services, an appropriate subject
of state and corporate concern, Brown argues. More laws trying to
compel business owners to run their companies in a certain way
won’t get us anywhere but more court battles. 

View this article.

To celebrate gay pride month
(technically June, but stuff tends to happen all summer anyway) a
Burger King in San Francisco started selling something called a

“Proud Whopper.” It was just a regular Whopper in a
rainbow-colored wrapper. There was nothing different about the
burger. Inside the wrapper, a message read “We are all the same
inside.” We are all delicious hamburgers! No, we’re all the same
people inside. It was kind of a weird message because most gay
folks are “the same” on the outside, too. But anyway. Burger King
produced a little video about it and it went modestly viral.

Periodically, whenever a major business takes a hankering to
marketing to the gays, there is an outrage, and not just from the
religious right. Those guys get outraged about all things gay,
lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or even just friendly smiles from
straight allies. No, sometimes outrage comes from certain folks on
the old guard left who, despite having lived through it, don’t seem
to have a good understanding of where gay liberation was actually
going and are shocked that the parade didn’t end with the
dismantling of the capitalist economy and full-throated embrace of
progressive politics by all gay people.

This time outrage duty fell on Julie Bindel, in The
Guardian. The headline and subhead annoy from the very start:
“The Proud Whopper? This is not the gay liberation we fought for:
The gay community has bought into marriage, babies and big business
at huge cost to its radical potential.”
What radical potential is she going on about?

The gay community used to be defined by politics, but lesbians
and gay men no longer share a political base – only, in some
quarters, a social one. Rather than meeting on the picket line, we
meet on a commercialised social scene, in clubs often owned by
straight entrepreneurs, or at the annual gay and lesbian wedding
show.

Saying the gay community was “defined by politics” is a bit
vague. The gay community was defined because of politics,
as in politicians and government force denying gays their rights.
She seems to think that the only reason gay activists from the time
were considered radical is self-identification. That’s nonsense.
Certainly many (even most) gay activists like saw themselves as
radical, but it ignores the fact that those with the power—the
government, the police, the politicians—cast gays as radicals and
dangerous. The government considered the gay person living quietly,
peacefully at home just as radical and dangerous (if not more so!)
than the ones organizing in community centers and marching on
police stations or government buildings.

Because Bindel sees herself as a radical and probably found
herself surrounded with similar folks during her life as an
activist, she has mistakenly come to a conclusion of what the gay
experience is or supposed to be. She seems to think that “radical”
and “gay” are supposed to be synonymous:

This deradicalised version of gay life revolves around marriage,
babies and mortgages. Many gays have kidded themselves that bigger
and richer sponsors for our Pride events and charities means
acceptance rather than acquiescence; that it is a sign we are
reaching full equality.

But how can we be liberated when there are still daily attacks
on gay people, and when the school playground remains, in many
ways, hostile to gay pupils? Just last week a YouGov poll,
commissioned by Stonewall, found that 86% of secondary school
teachers had witnessed homophobic bullying.

Holy crap, those goalposts zipped by so quickly, they left
behind a cartoon-style puff of smoke. Gay liberation was once about
being treated as equal by the government under the law and not
being beaten by police in raids, getting hauled off to jail,
getting humiliated in the newspaper, and losing jobs. Now gays
aren’t liberated as long as some kid is getting bullied? That
appears to me to be a definition of liberation that can never
actually come to pass. And what does it have to do with Burger King
or gay marriage? For that matter, what does it have to do with
being “radical”?

It is hardly surprising that we sometimes appreciate being
targeted by big business. Gay men, in particular, tend to have more
disposable income than their heterosexual counterparts, and while
there has been a baby boom in the gay community as a whole, the
majority of lesbians still don’t have children, so potentially have
more money to spend on luxury items such as exotic holidays and
expensive clothing.

…

Even pregnancy and childbirth have become commercialised. In
recent years a huge amount of money has been spent by lesbians and
gay men on embryos, sperm, IVF and surrogacy services. Now that we
are indivisible from straight people – at least those who marry and
have children – banks are targeting us to help increase their
profits. Last year, a cosy lesbian couple featured in one of
NatWest’s adverts, showing just how important our spending
potential is.

Some will hail all this as a great stride forward, an indication
that we are now so mainstream that even banks represent us
respectfully. But this is about equity, not equality.

Lesbians and gay men have accepted a fake, highly limited
liberation which involves spending and sponsorship, and embraces
the notion of inviting church and state back into our relationships
(preferably monogamous, with mortgages and babies). In the radical
days of the Gay Liberation Front, both lesbians and gay men wanted
to abolish marriage, not be invited to join this oppressive,
patriarchal regime. As Jill Tweedie wrote in this newspaper in
1971, Gay Lib does not plead for the right of homosexuals to marry,
“Gay Lib questions marriage”.

I know her questioning of state-controlled marriage will
resonate with many libertarians of all orientations, but her
definition of what is real liberation and fake liberation is not
based on equality or liberty. Her idea of the pursuit of happiness
is “the pursuit of what I tell you is supposed to make you happy.”
Her idea of “liberation” is really about instilling a new
orthodoxy, not eliminating it.

And she’s entirely wrong to say that what “lesbians and gay
wanted” was to abolish marriage. Again, she only sees the community
she was directly a part of and not the larger picture—as in, all
those gays and lesbians who were still in the closet or who didn’t
move out to the big cities and were, in fact, never radical.

Guess what? Those gays and lesbians are no longer in the closet.
And they are not and never were the radical anti-capitalist,
anti-business leftists that certain activists always thought they
would be. Burger King is right. Gay people are just like everybody
else. And most everybody else doesn’t want to abolish marriage or
think that the exchange of goods and services is a massive plot to
keep us all down. She continues:

What would real gay liberation look like? Marriage would be
abolished for all in favour of something based on equality and next
of kin rights rather than ownership and tax avoidance. Gay men and
lesbians alike would challenge a culture and politics based on
consumerism, and would speak out against the misogyny that confines
both groups to stereotypes. And we would look beyond the picket
fence and rejoin the picket lines in protest about the ongoing
oppression and anti-gay bigotry we still face, despite legislative
equality.

This isn’t “gay liberation.” This is the answer to the question,
“What does Julie Bindel think gay people should believe in?”
Because the larger gay population does not (and probably never did)
share Bindel’s larger values, she doesn’t grasp that there has been
no selling out. This is what many wanted all along. The label of
“radical” was forced on everybody included in the LGBT acronym by
the state. It didn’t mean everybody saw himself or herself that
way. Bindel’s failure to grasp that we don’t all share the same
goals or politics and never did pushes her into this space of
denying the agency of gay people everywhere. We’ve been “sold a
dream of marriages and babies” as though it we didn’t actually want
it. We were tricked by evil banks and businesses!

But it’s simply not true. Freedom means gay people can decide
what sort of relationships they want. Those who always dreamed
about getting married can have those dreams. Those who don’t want
to embrace the state’s classification of relationships don’t have
to. That’s liberation. What Bindel cannot grasp that being gay is
not radical, despite the fact that this was the argument coming
from the gay and lesbian community for decades now. She asks, “What
happened to that early radicalism?”

We won. That’s what happened.

A report in
the New England Journal of Medicine tallies up the various ways
that Obamacare has expanded health insurance coverage and estimates
that a total of 20 million people have “gained coverage under the
ACA” as of May 1. It’s a count of people obtaining coverage,
whether or not they had it before, not people who were previously
uninsured, and it’s meant to suggest the sweep of Obamacare’s
impact following its first enrollment period. But the sources used
for this tally don’t offer the kind of precision necessary to be
confident in the headline estimate. It’s not possible to pin down
the exact number of people covered because of the law, but this
figure is almost certainly overstated.

Here’s the graph showing where the figures come from.

Let’s start with the 1 million young adults. That number is
related to Obamacare’s requirement that insurers carry adult
dependents up to age 26, and it’s lower than the 3 million the
administration has long claimed from that provision, based cherry
picked year-to-year comparisons. The 1 million figure is within the
realm of plausibility, but it still might be high. As Avik Roy of
the Manhattan Institute has noted,
the only way you get to roughly one million here is if you credit
Obamacare’s requirement for essentially the entire recent expansion
of coverage amongst young adults. So, sure, a million is
possible—but it’s also possible that the number is quite a bit
smaller.

The next figure, which adds 8 million marketplace sign-ups into
the mix, comes from the administration’s reporting on how many
people have signed up for private coverage through the law’s health
exchanges. But as the authors note in the article, that figure
doesn’t account for people who signed up and didn’t pay, which,
based on government and insurance industry estimates, will likely
cut 10 to 15 percent from the total. That would bring the total
closer to 7 million (and that ignores the potential for attrition
due to non-payment in later months).

The article also count 5 million covered via purchase directly
from an insurer—that is, people who bought individual insurance,
but not through the law’s exchanges. As The Washington
Post’s Glenn Kessler
pointed out recently when examining a similar coverage claim
from the administration, these plans are not an obvious choice for
inclusion: 

Off-market plans are sold directly by insurance brokers or
insurance companies, meaning they generally do not qualify for
Obamacare subsidies. (An insurance agent could help someone enroll
on an exchange if they have proper certification.) But off-market
plans do include the protections included in the law, such as
guaranteed coverage for people with preexisting conditions and a
package of essential benefits.

Still, CBO
calculated that the number of off-exchange plans would drop
from about 10 million to 5 million as people moved to buying
insurance on the exchanges. So why should she tout a figure that
was due to go down because of the law, especially because she said
she was talking about people with “affordable coverage”?

Finally, the graph cites 6 million enrollments in Medicaid or
CHIP (the Children’s Health Insurance Program). That number
presumably comes from a June administration
report stating that, nationwide, Medicaid enrollment has
increased by 6 million following Obamacare’s open enrollment
period. But this number, too, likely overstates Obamacare’s direct
effect on the expansion.

For one thing, it includes people who were previously eligible
for Medicaid, and merely signed up after October. For another, as
the authors note, it includes people in states that did not expand
Medicaid under Obamacare (although the administration reports that
sign-ups rose much faster, at a rate of 15.3 percent, in states
that participated in the expansion, compared with 3.3 percent in
non-expansion states). The administration’s report also says that
states are still reporting Medicaid figures in a variety of
different ways, and thus cautions that this “limits the conclusions
that can be drawn from the data.” Even the administration does not
seem to want to claim the entire 6 million: “It is important to
note that multiple factors contribute to the change in enrollment
between April 2014 and the July-September 2013 baseline period,”
the report says, “including but not limited to changes attributable
to the Affordable Care Act.” Obamacare was part of the story—but
not all of it.

It seems clear that millions of people, some of whom were
previously insured and many who were not, did in fact obtain health
coverage through Obamacare’s various coverage-expanding provisions.
But it’s too early to say exactly how many so far—only that 20
million is almost certainly an overstatement.