As we look ahead to Thursday night's presidential debate, I'm interested in the question of what candidates will be saying about their plans for Obamacare now that it's up and running and people are receiving subsidized health insurance plans. After all, it gets pretty difficult, politically speaking, to take something away from people that they already have. I'm reminded of what happened back in March when Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chair of the House GOP conference, took to Facebook to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act by asking to hear real-life horror stories from real people.

This week marks the 5th anniversary of #Obamacare being signed into law. Whether it's turned your tax filing into a nightmare, you're facing skyrocketing premiums, or your employer has reduced your work hours, I want to hear about it.



Please share your story with me so that I can better understand the challenges you're facing: http://mcmorris.house.gov/ your-story/

Instead she got this:

This is mostly just an object lesson in social media use. As many brands have discovered, opening yourself up to this kind of dialogue is basically an open invitation to get trolled.

But it also reveals something fundamental about the structure of the Affordable Care Act. Reasonable people can disagree about whether this law is, all things considered, a good idea. But one of the main things it does is raise taxes rather dramatically on a pretty small number of high-income people in order to give subsidized health insurance policies to a substantially larger number of low-income people. Indeed, this is one of the main things Republicans don't like about it!

But if you do a simple head count, you are almost certainly going to find more people getting discount insurance than people paying extra taxes.