Bottom Story of the Day

The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

Bottom Story of the Day 
“George Clooney Hopes Government Shutdown Ends Soon”–headline, Associated Press, Oct. 2

News of the Tautological
“Fraud Firm Gets OK to Sign People Up for ObamaCare”–headline, New York Post, Oct. 1

News You Can Use 
“Don’t Like Obamacare? Just ‘Opt Out,’ Sharpton Shrugs”–headline, NewsBusters.org, Oct. 1

Brendan Mahoney Saves ObamaCare
“People complain of having to stand in line for hours, often in vain, and many are losing patience with the government’s explanation that unsavory conspirators are to blame for the nation’s problems,” reports the New York Times.

But enough about Venezuela. Let’s talk about ObamaCare.

“President Barack Obama on Monday said he “absolutely” expects glitches and problems,”Politico reports. And these glitches, according to the president, will continue at least until the end of the year: “In the first week, first month, first three months, I would suspect that there will be glitches.”

Glitches are good, argues [NY Times columnist Paul Krugman] our favorite former Enron adviser: “Lots of people logging on and signing up on the very first day…is an early indication that it’s going to be fine, that plenty of people will sign up for the first year of health reform.”

Naysayers will counter that this doesn’t prove huge numbers of people are signing up; it could be that ObamaCare is unpopular and its computer systems are incompetently designed. Moreover, whether ObamaCare “works” will be determined not by how many people are signing up but what kind of people. ObamaCare relies on price controls that jack up premiums on the young and healthy in order to keep them low on the old and sickly. If the latter but not the former are signing up in huge numbers–that is, if people are responding rationally to incentives–then the scheme is unsustainable.

Yeasayers insist that young Americans are going to greet ObamaCare’s navigators as liberators, showering them with flowers and candy and chants of “Democracy! Whiskey! Healthy!” And it’s happening! Tara McGuinness, a senior ObamaCare publicity agent, tweeted yesterday: “One Man’s Experience As Health Exchange Begins Enrollment: ‘It Made My Day.’ ” A similar tweet, from an unverified account called @Obamacare, was retweeted by Organizing for America, the 501(c)(4) nonprofit that sells access to the president. The tweets link to a Hartford Courant article that tells this exciting success story.

Meet Brendan Mahoney, the young man who is saving ObamaCare. He’s 30 years old, a third-year law student at the University of Connecticut. He’s actually been insured for the past three years–in 2011 and 2012 through a $2,400-a-year school-sponsored health plan, and this year through “a high-deductible, low-premium plan that cost about $39 a month through a UnitedHealthcare subsidiary.” But he wanted to see what ObamaCare had to offer.

He tried logging in to the exchange’s website at 8:45 a.m. yesterday, which is impressive in itself. Most young people don’t get up that early. “He said the system could not verify his identity.” So he called the toll-free help line, whose operator also encountered computer trouble. “But then he logged on a second time, he said, and the system worked.”

“Once it got running, it was fast,” Mahoney tells the Courant. “It really made my day. It’s a lot like TurboTax.” He obtained insurance through ObamaCare. Now, he says, “if I get sick, I’ll definitely go to the doctor.” Even better, if he stays healthy, he won’t need to go to a doctor, and his premiums will support chronically ill policyholders on the wrong side of 40.

So, how much of a premium is strapping young Brendan Mahoney paying to help make ObamaCare work? Oops. The Courant reports that Mahoney “said that by filling out the application online, he discovered he was eligible for Medicaid. So, beginning next year, he won’t pay any premium at all.”

So the great success story of ObamaCare’s first day is the transformation of a future lawyer who was already paying for insurance into a welfare case.