After having spent months and months discouraging enrollment—occasionally by peddling the outright lie that under Obamacare people can simply wait until they're sick to buy insurance—conservatives now want you to be outraged about the fact that the law sets open-enrollment periods outside of which people can't buy insurance. Even if, like Angstadt, you urgently need valve-replacement surgery.

As political strategies go, persuading people to skip something, then feigning anger on their behalf when they can't access it, is breathtaking in its cynicism. But this was worse than cynical politics. It was playing with people's lives in an insanely reckless way.

Once the alternative to enrolling became clear to Angstadt, his choice was obvious. And everything seems to have worked out alright. But that's only because he happened to get extremely sick during an open-enrollment period.

There's an alternate ending to this story, in which Angstadt doesn't get desperate for care until April or May and—having acted upon the misinformation he's now combating—is uninsured, locked out, can't pay for his surgery, and dies. Or maybe he lucks out, goes bankrupt, and spends his golden years in poverty.