Here's a story Democrats may want to tout again and again heading into the midterm elections.
Pennsylvania logger Dean Angstadt needed valve-replacement surgery to fix a life-threatening heart problem, but he wasn't sure he could afford the procedure, as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported Monday. Though Angstadt was initially leery of ObamaCare, he signed up after enough prodding from a friend, enrolling in a plan that in the first month cost him just $26.11.
New plan in hand, Angstadt got the surgery and pulled through. "I could have done backflips if I was in better shape," he told the Inquirer.
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So why did he resist enrolling in ObamaCare for so long? As he explained to the Washington Post's Erik Wemple, he's a Fox News guy who trusted Republicans' dire warnings about the law.
MSNBC and other liberal-leaning outlets are promoting the story as proof that the law works, and that a powerful GOP messaging war has wrongly turned vulnerable folks away from it. And indeed, there's some merit to that claim. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey last month found that people were more likely to support ObamaCare provisions if they didn't know they were part of ObamaCare. And another poll last year found that though 46 percent of Americans opposed "ObamaCare," only 36 percent opposed the Affordable Care Act, even though the two are one and the same.
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