Let's call it the Luis Lang Effect.

The FacePalm is strong with this story by Michael Tesler in the Washington Post (not that I'm criticizing the story, mind you; he did a great job on it):

• More Democrats are getting health insurance, thanks to Obamacare. Why are Republicans staying away?

Democrats were naturally declared the big winners of last month’s King v. Burwell Supreme Court decision. That ruling, after all, saved the party’s most significant legislative accomplishment in decades: The Affordable Care Act (ACA).

But Obamacare has not simply been an ideological victory for the Democratic Party. The percentage of Democrats with health insurance has increased dramatically since the ACA’s marketplace went online in October 2013, according to weekly surveys conducted by YouGov for the Economist. In fact, the display below suggests that Democrats’ uninsured rates have essentially been cut in half under Obamacare.

...For starters, party identification was a powerful determinant of whether uninsured Americans planned to purchase health care insurance or pay the ACA’s fine down the road for failing to do so.  According to Gallup surveys of nearly 4,000 uninsured adults in the last quarter of 2013, Republicans were three times more likely than Democrats to say they would remain uninsured and pay the fine (45 percent to 15 percent respectively).

...Taken together, the results suggest that Republican opposition to the ACA has spilled over into enrolling for Obamacare. Uninsured Republicans may, therefore, increasingly find themselves torn between their own needs for health insurance and their strong aversion towards the ACA. Indeed, that conflict has recently played out in a number of high-profile incidents in which uninsured opponents of Obamacare now desperately require its assistance.

And yes, of course, he linked to the Luis Lang saga for that last part.

Not much else for me to add here, really; Tesler did all the research & number-crunching. Plus, respectfully, this outcome isn't exactly shocking anyway, seeing how most GOP-controlled states have been doing everything in their power to block/slow down the enrollment process for their own residents.

Of course, there is one important difference: In Mr. Lang's case, the brouhaha over his story opened his eyes (figuratively) and made him realize how foolish he had been. Sadly, I suspect the same won't be true for most of the Republicans referred to in Tesler's story.