By Chris Reed

Last week, when the California agency that has the lead role in implementing Obamacare announced the rate structure for various insurance plans to be offered beginning Jan. 1, 2014, the media jumped to a lot of conclusions — conclusions flattering to Obamacare, as one would expect from a media that mostly waited until after the health care overhaul was adopted to point out its many immense flaws. (The New York Times put out a devastating analysis — but it was three weeks after Obamacare was signed into law!)

On California’s version of Obamacare, here was what the Los Angeles Times emphasized early in its story:

“‘These rates are way below the worst-case gloom-and-doom scenarios we have heard,’ said Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California, the state agency implementing the healthcare law.”

Here was what The New York Times’ Paul Krugman emphasized:

” … important new evidence — especially from California, the law’s most important test case — suggests that the real Obamacare shock will be one of unexpected success. … the California bids are in — that is, insurers have submitted the prices at which they are willing to offer coverage on the state’s newly created Obamacare exchange. And the prices, it turns out, are surprisingly low. A handful of healthy people may find themselves paying more for coverage, but it looks as if Obamacare’s first year in California is going to be an overwhelmingly positive experience.”

LAT and Krugman: What they didn’t mention

Not so fast, say two journalists who have written extensively about Obamacare, and not from inside the tank that houses the mainstream media.

This is from Avik Roy of Forbes:

“If you’re a 25 year old male non-smoker, buying insurance for yourself, the cheapest plan on Obamacare’s exchanges is the catastrophic plan, which costs an average of $184 a month. (That’s the median monthly premium across California’s 19 insurance rating regions.)

“The next cheapest plan, the ‘bronze’ comprehensive plan, costs $205 a month. But in 2013, on eHealthInsurance.com (NASDAQ:EHTH), the average cost of the five cheapest plans was only $92. In other words, for the average 25-year-old male non-smoking Californian, Obamacare will drive premiums up by between 100 and 123 percent.

“Under Obamacare, only people under the age of 30 can participate in the slightly cheaper catastrophic plan. So if you’re 40, your cheapest option is the bronze plan. In California, the median price of a bronze plan for a 40-year-old male non-smoker will be $261. But on eHealthInsurance, the average cost of the five cheapest plans was $121. That is, Obamacare will increase individual-market premiums by an average of 116 percent.

“For both 25-year-olds and 40-year-olds, then, Californians under Obamacare who buy insurance for themselves will see their insurance premiums double.”

This is from Peter Suderman of Reason:

“… this good news is not as good as it might sound, because it’s based on a misleading comparison: next year’s individual market rates with this year’s small-employer plans. A more useful comparison would be with this year’s individual-market premiums. And what that comparison reveals is that rate shock is real, and that the hikes are far larger than the comparison with small-group rates would suggest.”

Karma time: Bay Area to be hardest hit

The good news here is that as much as the media has been cheerleading for Obamacare, it remains highly unpopular — even before it kicks in. When people actually have to pay much more for insurance than they used to, the backlash is likely to reach a whole new level.

And here in California, the hardest-hit will be Obama’s biggest fans. Karma, baby! Avik Roy of Forbes says Obamacare’s impact on premiums for 40-year-olds “is steepest in the San Francisco Bay area, especially in the counties north of San Francisco, like Marin, Napa, and Sonoma.”

More from Roy:

“Supporters of Obamacare justified passage of the law because one insurer in California [Anthem Blue Cross] raised rates on some people by as much as 39 percent. But Obamacare itself more than doubles the cost of insurance on the individual market. I can understand why Democrats in California would want to mislead the public on this point. But journalists have a professional responsibility to check out the facts for themselves.”

If only California journalists lived up to that professional responsibility.

By Chris Reed

When a friend urged me to check out the edition of “Dan Rather Reports” on high-speed rail in the U.S. that aired last month on Mark Cuban’s AXS.TV, I figured it would be good for a few laughs, but that at least the former CBS anchor would note the volume of intense bipartisan disdain for the California project and offer up some honest context. This is what the Washington Post and New York Times have done.

But no. The AXS coverage confirms that the bullet train is now in the pantheon of things that the MSNBC left considers inviolate as a matter of religious conviction. And so Rather’s report depicts opposition to the California bullet train as a function of partisanship, not a reaction to its near-infinite problems driven by the honesty of watchdogs, lawmakers of both parties, and beat reporters around California:

“RATHER (Voiceover): You’d think that it would be easy to build a high-speed rail project in a place like the Golden State. But even here in California the dreams for high-speed rail are hanging by a thread — with fierce opposition — environmental, legal, and most importantly political.”

That is mind-boggling. The cost, the logistics and local opposition are far more relevant than political considerations in California. To define the problems as “most importantly political” is to define them as being about something other than legit concerns.

There’s more:

“RATHER (Voiceover): The most vocal opposition would come from where construction was set to begin — California’s lush Central Valley.”

Central Valley objections featured, Silicon Valley objections ignored

Once again, not even close to true. The most vocal opposition came from the rich and powerful residents of the Silicon Valley — which is why Gov. Jerry Brown and President Obama went along with shifting the first segment to the Central Valley. This is not a small point. It allows the piece to depict concerns as being parochial and petty and (this is implicit) driven by dumb farmers and their narrow self-interest. It allows Rather to ignore the fact that the area with the richest concentration of rich liberals outside of Manhattan thinks the bullet train is crazy and destructive — because they’ve actually bothered to consider the real-world consequences:

Finally, when Rather did “60 Minutes” pieces, you could always tell his personal view by whom he gave the longest soundbite to. Some things never change. And so the longest soundbite goes to a Central Valley tomato farmer, Brad Johns, who can’t wait to be bought out and relocated away from the bullet train:

“I think the high-speed rail is being very American. I think our government is trying the best it can to get folks back to work and when the private citizens quit buying then it has been proven in every economy around the world that the government steps up and starts building infrastructure projects and that starts the bucks rolling and people start getting paychecks instead of unemployment checks. It cuts our dependency on foreign oil. It will clean up the air. It will take cars off the road. It will cut down traffic deaths. You could go as far as to say it’s a public safety issue on top of everything else. I think this is a huge blessing for the state of California.”

In a 6,000-plus word transcript of the AXS report, not once does Rather acknowledge any of the many lies told to state voters in 2008 to get their support, except for the ridiculously low cost estimate. Not once does he acknowledge that voters only gave the project narrow approval after being promised it wouldn’t need future government subsidies. Not once does he mention that promised private investment has never been forthcoming.

The new ‘federal government as cornerstone’ narrative

Instead, he uses the new mantra of the bullet-train cultists: Projects of this size have never been built without the federal government’s vast support, ergo, the federal government owes us this vast support.

But that’s not what state voters were told in 2008. Nor was it an assurance that the federal government gave voters in 2008. It was only after Ezekiel Emanuel, the oncologist brother of incoming President Obama’s chief of staff, trumpeted bullet trains did they become a priority of the federal government.

Isn’t that an interesting angle to pursue? But of course. Yet except for a passing mention in a well-reviewed book by The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber called “The Escape Artists” and subsequent coverage by Reason’s Peter Suderman and by me, no one in the mainstream media has mentioned this.

Why? I have no idea. As I mentioned above, the N.Y. Times and Washington Post have done some strong reporting on the bullet train.

And in general, that holds for big projects of other sorts. For example, after some initial hesitation, Solyndra and its fellow follies are being pretty well-covered.

So why not share the bullet train’s amazing creation story? In terms of the federal money that’s going to be wasted, it remains “Solyndra Times Seven” — at least.