Krugman: Obamacare and the Cockroaches

In policy discourse, zombies and cockroaches are somewhat different.

Zombie ideas are claims that should have been killed by evidence, but just keep shambling along, like the notion that vast numbers of Canadians, frustrated by socialized medicine, come to America in search of treatment. (It was in a paper about that and other myths that I first encountered the zombie terminology.) Cockroaches are claims that disappear for a while when proved ludicrously wrong, but just keep on coming back.

I think of the notion that Obamacare hasn’t really reduced the number of uninsured as a cockroach; it seemed to me that it subsided for a while after the big enrollment numbers of 2014 and the sharp drop in uninsurance rates. And really, how could you continue to make that claim given the results shown above, which are corroborated by independent sources like Gallup?

Anyway, it’s another example of the proposition that in modern political discourse, in particular on the right, no bad argument is ever abandoned. It’s like inequality, where the current position of the usual suspects is that it hasn’t gone up, it has gone up but it’s a good thing, we can’t do anything about it, and anyway it’s all the fault of liberals. You might think one would have to choose one of these lines, but they don’t.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/obamacare-and-the-cockroaches/