...concedes that, yes, insurance coverage has risen. But he declares that this was never in doubt:
That more people would be insured was never in dispute. If you mandate that people buy something, penalize them if they don’t and give it away to some, more people will end up with it. The proper response to this is: Duh.
Asness is absolutely right that it was completely obvious.... The same [RomneyCare] system... was tried in Massachusetts.... Despite the blithering obviousness of the fact that Obamacare would bring about a major decline in people lacking insurance, lots of conservatives denied that it would happen. I rounded up a handful of examples the other day, though plenty more can be found:
The National Center for Policy Analysis... 2013, ‘the massive law that was enacted to solve the problem of the uninsured in America is more likely to worsen it.’... Avik Roy... 2014. ‘But new data suggests that Obamacare may fail even to achieve this goal.’ Obamacare would result in ‘essentially the same number of uninsured,’ insisted Charles Krauthammer....
People deny obvious cause-and-effect relationships all the time. People even deny that the massive release of heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere will trap more heat — people like Cliff Asness....
Indeed, it is not even clear that Asness is conceding Obamacare’s impact on insurance now. In his op-ed, he suggests, ‘The real question is how many of those covered by ObamaCare were previously uninsured.’ Well, that’s why you measure the net number of uninsured people.... Asness seems unclear on this concept, so I’ll unpack it a bit. Here’s a chart showing the decline in the rate of uninsured Americans:
Those numbers at the top... represent the proportion of Americans lacking insurance before Obamacare went into effect. The number at the right, 11.9 percent, represents the current total. That means that Obamacare has so far resulted in a net 6 percent of the American population that was previously uninsured gaining insurance coverage. If Obamacare was mostly enrolling people who already had insurance, there would not be a large drop in the uninsured rate. That’s what ‘the largest reduction in the uninsured in four decades’ means.... Asness is managing and founding principal of AQR Capital Management, which is helpful to know in case you’re looking to put your savings in the hands of a man who has strong opinions on topics of which he has lacks basic comprehension.
I've swung around to thinking that AQR's business model before 2008 was picking-up-nickles-in-front-of-steamrollers, that it's hard to get investors to commit to that business model today, and it's much easier to attract rich-but-not-smart right-wing money by publicly pandering to their ideological prejudices. That's my guess as to what is currently going on...
