With a hat tip to Moonbat, please see this Los Angeles Times article by Michael Hiltzik about yesterday’s “Obamacare is killing my mother” story.

Hiltzik analysis reveals, as I suspected, that Stephen Blackwood’s mother isn’t having a problem with “Obamacare”; she’s having a problem with the private insurance industry. We still don’t know why Blue Cross dumped Mother’s policy, but the most likely reason is that Blue Cross chose to dump her and gave Obamacare as the excuse. Her issues with her difficulties in navigating the insurance market are in large part because Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell deliberately made it that way. The issue about Humana not covering the cancer meds has nothing whatsoever to do with Obamacare. That’s an issue with Humana and Humana’s deceptive sales reps.

Another interesting tidbit, from a commenter — the author Stephen Blackwood, is the “president of Ralston College,” but Ralston College doesn’t actually exist. Blackwood is in the process of raising money to build it. That doesn’t make Blackwood a bad person, of course. But we really don’t know anything about Blackwood.

Hiltzik’s conclusion:

That does point to a problem with Obamacare, just not the one Stephen Blackwood and the Wall Street Journal think it does. The problem is that the Affordable Care Act not only left commercial insurers at the center of our healthcare system, but strengthened their grip on coverage. Many of the problems that have cropped up with the ACA are reflections of the private industry’s role, including its lousy customer service.

There’s no question that confusion and complexity still govern America’s healthcare system. But for millions of Americans, there’s less of that, and more fairness, than there was before the ACA. Judging from her son’s op-ed, Catherine Blackwood is still getting her cancer treatment, with the exception of a decision about medication that Humana should be ashamed about.

Blackwood wrote that “it is precisely because health care for 300 million people is so complicated that it cannot be centrally managed.” But the ACA is the exact opposite of “centrally managed” healthcare. In fact, as advocates of a single-payer system argue, if it were centrally managed, it might work better.