The right's hypocrisy over ACA

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LOL..

The Indiana Republican Party has requested that the state's constituents share their "horror stories" with ObamaCare, the Indianapolis Star  reported Tuesday. "What's your Obamacare horror story? Let us know," the GOP party wrote in a Facebook post as it sought to collect negative stories about the Affordable Care Act like higher premiums or insurance companies leaving the market.

Many of the people respondents, however, flooded them with stories about how the healthcare system positively affected their lives. "My sister finally has access to affordable quality care and treatment for her diabetes," one person wrote, according to the news outlet. "My father's small business was able to insure its employees for the first time ever. #thanksObama," another said. Another person claimed that "the only horror in the story is that Republicans might take it away."

Vice President Mike Pence's home state party push to highlight the Affordable Care Act's downfalls comes at a time when the Senate Republicans are working to get their own healthcare bill passed in the upper chamber. The measure repeals and replaces key provisions of ObamaCare and includes deep cuts to Medicaid. An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revealed 22 million more Americans would love healthcare insurance in the next decade if the Senate bill is passed. .

Indiana GOP request for ObamaCare ‘horror stories’ goes wrong | TheHill

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The heartbreaking saga of Charlie Gard, a terminally ill 11-month-old boy in a London hospital, has electrified the American right in recent weeks. Charlie has an extremely rare genetic condition that experts agree is incurable. His parents, Connie Yates and Chris Gard, want to take him to the United States for an experimental treatment they believe could prolong his life. They have raised about $1.7 million to do so, and have found an American hospital willing to provide the therapy.

But Great Ormond Street Hospital, where Charlie has been receiving treatment since October, has decided that withdrawing life support is the only reasonable and humane option, and refuses to release Charlie to his parents’ custody. The child cannot hear, see, move, or breathe on his own, suffers frequent seizures, and has irreversible brain damage at the cellular level. Even the American neurologist working with the family has conceded the treatment is unlikely to improve his condition; what is more likely is that Charlie is in pain.

The question of what a society owes its most vulnerable citizens could also point directly to a moral argument for a robust, protective health-care system that takes dignified care of every citizen, not just those who can afford it. Instead, many conservative outlets are using the Gard case as an argument against a more protective safety net. The Washington Times: “Charlie Gard makes Trump case for speedy Obamacare repeal.” The Federalist: “Yanking Life Support From UK Baby Demonstrates Dangers Of Socialized Medicine.” InfoWars video I won’t link to: “Charlie Gard Exposes the Horrors of Single Payer.” These claims rest on fear-mongering over an all-powerful National Health Service, one that decides—in tandem with a totalitarian court system—whose life in the U.K. is worthwhile and whose is too expensive.

Raising the specter of "death panels,” these outlets have turned one hard case into a sweeping referendum on the inherent justice and effectiveness of socialized medicine. It’s as if the death of one child matters, but the death of thousands is the cost of “reform.” Or as if intervening in one complex and tragic case is heroic, but building a system that would prevent the suffering of many more is intolerable overreach.

It seems dubious, to put it kindly, that President Trump was thinking of those questions when he burst into the public conversation around the Charlie Gard case. More likely, he was keying into the rising attention to the child’s plight among his base and their news sources, including Fox News. Trump’s showboating is infuriating given his attacks on the kind of scientific and medical research that would make life better for children like Charlie. His proposed budget would slash funding for the National Institutes of Health by $5.8 billion. It would also cut Medicaid, which covers 39 percent of American children, by $800 billion; the Senate's version of the health care bill makes other devastating cuts to the program. Meanwhile, the U.S. infant mortality rate is already significantly higher than the rates in Europe and other developed parts of the world.

The Right Is Turning the Charlie Gard Tragedy into a Case Against Single-Payer Health Care. It’s the Opposite.

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It's mostly repeal, little replace:

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised, over and over again, that he would replace Obamacare with “something terrific,” that would “take care of everybody” and be “a lot less expensive” for consumers and the government. But despite claims by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) that his latest version of Trumpcare would provide “stability” while “improving affordability,” Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price made a major admission about the bill Sunday: that the legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare would simply permit insurers return to the ways they used to operate.

On ABC’s This Week, the longtime Obamacare critic was pressed by Jon Karl about a provision in the bill pushed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), which would allow insurance companies to offer sub-standard plans. Karl noted that not only do more than 10 medical groups and 32 cancer organizations oppose the Trumpcare bill, “a rare joint statement by the biggest insurance companies in the country called the Cruz amendment ‘unworkable in any form’ [as] ‘it would lead to, ‘widespread terminations of coverage.” Price responded that he found that wall of opposition “really perplexing, especially from the insurance companies, cause all they have to do is dust off how they did business before Obamacare.””

Tom Price admits that the new Trumpcare is only repeal, no replace

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Here's how to expose the right wing hypocrisy over healthcare:

One constituent who spoke out was Bob Cox, Moran’s daughters’ pediatrician, who joked that he knew the senator’s daughters before he met Moran. “The federal government is charged with the protection of its citizens from external threat,” Cox said. “The U.S. military provides this service, and it’s funded appropriately. We as a culture have not accepted the responsibility to protect citizens from internal threat, disease and injury.” Cox noted that taxes might increase to protect against internal threats of disease, but the benefits would outweigh the costs.

Republican senator confronted by his daughters’ pediatrician over health care bill

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Actually the whole thread should be called right's lies about the ACA..

From Media Matters

CNN is paying Stephen Moore to lie to its viewers about health care
If you're going to give Moore air time, at least fact-check him
Blog ››› July 17, 2017 2:08 PM EDT ››› CRAIG HARRINGTON

Discredited economic pundit and former Trump campaign adviser Stephen Moore continues embarrassing CNN during news segments with his supposed policy expertise. Media Matters compared two of Moore’s recent appearances -- one in which he appeared alongside a credentialed policy expert, and one in which he faced only an ill-prepared network host -- and found distinct differences in the tone of each discussion. These differences demonstrate the dangers of news outlets continuing to rely on unscrupulous hangers-on from the Trump administration to comment on policy issues.

Over the years, Media Matters has chronicled Moore’s shoddy predictions, intentional misinformation, and misleading claims. Despite ample evidence of Moore’s gross incompetence as an economic analyst, CNN still hired him in January under the guise of “senior economics analyst” to serve as a sort of in-house surrogate for the Trump administration. Moore has spent his time at CNN undermining his colleagues and embarrassing his network while ceaselessly parroting the Republican Party’s agenda. His shameless defense of the president’s unfounded reasoning for withdrawing from the Paris climate accord even led Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs to blast CNN on its own program for maintaining a relationship with the pundit.

Moore’s two appearances late last week underscore how problematic he is as an employee of a news network and reveal how CNN ought to handle his future appearances. During the July 13 edition of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, Moore was interviewed alongside University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee about the Republican-led Senate’s floundering proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Moore opened the segment by endorsing an amendment authored by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), which experts believe would restrict coverage options and increase costs for Americans living with pre-existing conditions. He misleadingly blamed the ACA for increasing health care costs -- prices are actually "rising at historically low levels" since the law went into effect -- and encouraged the use of so-called “catastrophic” insurance policies, which provide limited packages to young individuals at low cost and are considered inadequate by health care experts. Luckily for CNN viewers, Goolsbee -- a former chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisers and college debate champion -- was there to provide pushback to these false and misleading claims:

[Video, see original article]

Compare Goolsbee’s repeated fact-check of Moore’s misstatements to another Moore appearance in which CNN did not host an economic policy expert to counter the conservative pundit. On the July 14 edition of CNN’s Wolf, Moore sat for an interview with guest host Jim Sciutto, the network’s chief national security correspondent, to discuss the same topics and was allowed to promote his right-wing agenda virtually unchallenged. Moore falsely claimed that catastrophic health insurance plans could save middle-class families thousands of dollars and got away with an unsubstantiated guess that politically, the GOP bill’s reduction of insurance premiums outweighs the fact that it would strip coverage from 22 million people. When Sciutto questioned him about the fact that repealing ACA would harm millions of Americans who receive Medicaid, Moore promoted the right-wing lie that “Medicaid is one of the worst insurance systems” and low-income Americans would be better off without it. Sciutto did not challenge Moore when he falsely claimed that the ACA repeal process in 2017 is “déjà vu all over again” compared to how the law was passed in 2010 when, according to Moore, then-President Barack Obama “had to buy those last couple of votes in Senate to get there.” In reality, the ACA passed 60-39 with the support of every Democrat in the chamber, whereas the current Senate bill has yet to get 50 supporters among 52 Republican senators:

Moore’s partisan talking points can be easily unraveled by competent analysts and experts; his attempt to promote the same right-wing fallacies about health care was rebutted by health care expert Andy Slavitt during the July 10 edition of New Day. In fact, his dissembling can be easily countered if the interviewer is adequately prepared. But since Moore is a professional misinformer who has spent years honing his craft, if an interviewer is ill-prepared, the segment can quickly devolve into Moore amplifying his routine talking points, which serve only his conservative political agenda.

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This is what the Republicans are trying to do:

A Republican fallback plan to repeal all of Obamacare without a replacement health program would lead to 32 million more people uninsured than under current law, the Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday. That’s about 10 million more uninsured than the estimated 22 million people who wouldn’t be covered under a previous Senate Republican bill to replace many parts of Obamacare. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said the Senate may vote on the measure as soon as next week, though support for it is uncertain. The full-repeal proposal is called the Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act. It’s an updated version of a bill that Republicans passed in 2015 that was vetoed by then-president Barack Obama. The proposal would repeal Obamacare’s coverage expansion in two years, giving lawmakers time to come up with a replacement.

It [the repeal only] would also raise the costs for people to buy insurance, by about 25 percent in 2018 and more afterwards. The bill eliminates a requirement that all Americans carry insurance, which would mean that those who ended up buying health coverage would be sicker, causing insurers to charge more to make up for their costs. After 2020, “enrollment would continue to drop and premiums would continue to increase in each subsequent year,” the CBO said.

GOP's Obamacare Repeal Cut Insured by 32 Million, CBO Says - Bloomberg

And they think this is OK?!

Keep Americans safe!

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When propaganda replaces independent analysis..

Tuesday I wrote about the GOP’s systematic efforts to discredit and disempower any independent voice — media, the Congressional Budget Office, the Office of Government Ethics — that tries to hold government accountable. Today we have a great example of the ridiculous propaganda that Republicans expect the public to swallow in the absence of such independent critics and scorekeepers.

The Washington Examiner has gotten its hands on a Trump administration “analysis” (I use that word loosely) of the Consumer Freedom Amendment, a proposal from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). This amendment to the possibly-now-defunct Senate health-care bill would allow insurers to sell individual market plans that meet none of Obamacare’s health insurance standards and quality floors, so long as those same insurers also sell some plans that do.

Talk to literally any economist, including conservative ones, and you’ll learn that this idea would lead to adverse selection, a huge spike in premiums for sick people (who would sort into the Obamacare-compliant plans), a proliferation of mini-med junk plans that cover virtually nothing (which would attract the healthier people), and a possible death spiral. A more detailed explanation of this phenomenon is here.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office would normally be tasked with assessing the impact of such a proposal, on both the federal budget and health insurance markets: coverage rates, premiums, etc. Last week, however, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) suggested that there might not be sufficient time for the CBO to score the bill before Republican leadership’s artificially short deadline. Sad!


Thune thus proposed the unprecedented strategy of cutting the CBO out of the bill-scoring process entirely. Instead, he suggested, Republicans could just use an analysis to be crafted by either the Department of Health and Human Services or the Office of Management and Budget — i.e., the White House.

Which, unlike CBO, has a dog in this fight. As is completely clear from the pseudo-analysis that the Examiner obtained. Contrary to the predictions of economists everywhere, the HHS propaganda document claims that the Cruz amendment would cause insurance coverage to go up and premiums to fall. Astoundingly, even premiums for people in the Obamacare-compliant plans — which, again, economic theory suggests would get stuck with only the very sickest, most expensive Americans — would allegedly decline relative to current law. (Compare “2020 Current Law Enrollment Weighted Average” to “2020 Silver ACA Compliant” in the chart below.)

This ridiculous Republican propaganda is exactly why we need the CBO - The Washington Post

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President Donald Trump's administration has been quietly waging a public relations campaign to undermine public support for Obamacare, former President Barack Obama's signature legislation, according to a new Daily Beast report.

Using social media and a series of video testimonials, the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Tom Price, is amplifying criticism of the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, and discouraging enrollment in the program.

Using funds earmarked for "consumer information and outreach," HHS has produced and released 23 videos of Americans talking about their difficulties with Obamacare, according to The Daily Beast. 

Ryan Stanton, a Kentucky physician who was featured in an HHS testimonial, told The Daily Beast that he felt pressured to speak more critically of the health law than he wanted to. "I don't think mine was the exact message they were looking for of, 'Oh, let's march against Obamacare,'" he said. "It was clearly an effort to push the repeal and replace."


HHS's website has also removed and altered information about the healthcare law. One page on the site, entitled "Empowering Patients" reads: "with skyrocketing premiums and narrowing choices, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has done damage to this market and created great burdens for many Americans." Twitter accounts run by HHS and Price have also been used to criticize Obamacare and promote Republican repeal and replacement legislation. 

Trump is funding a PR campaign to undermine Obamacare - Business Insider

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The finding, pointed out by Axios health care editor David Nather, is on page eight of the CBO report on the recently revised Better Care Reconciliation Act:

The limit on out-of-pocket spending in 2026 is projected to be $10,900. (Under current regulations, the limit on out-of-pocket spending is defined by a formula based on projections of national health expenditures.) Therefore, plans with an actuarial value of 58 percent and a deductible of $13,000 would exceed that limit and would not comply with the law unless the formula used to calculate the limit was adjusted.

In short, the BCRA makes changes to regulations that will cause annual deductibles for individual market health plans to skyrocket — to $13,000. But other regulations set the legal limit on annual out-of-pocket spending to $10,900. This means the BCRA’s health plans could actually violate the law.

Republicans could amend their bill to fix this — if they choose to push forward with the BCRA, which for now looks like it’s not going to pass. But for now, it’s an embarrassing finding by the CBO.

The CBO found a huge problem with the Republican health care bill - Vox

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It really was their own plan, even if it is now called Obamacare (and before that it was Romneycare)...

Heritage On Health, 1989

Every once in a while people make the point that much of what eventually became Obamacare came from, of all places, the Heritage Foundation – that is, the ACA is basically what conservatives used to advocate on health care. So I recently reread Stuart Butler’s 1989 Heritage Foundation lecture, “Assuring Affordable Health Care For All Americans” – hmm, where have I seen similar language? — to see how true that is; and the answer is, it really is pretty much true.

First of all, this wasn’t just one guy at Heritage writing: Butler referred to his proposal as “the Heritage plan”, referring to a monograph that lays it out and does indeed present it as the institution’s policy, not just his opinion. Second, while the Heritage plan wasn’t exactly the same as ObamaRomneycare, it was pretty close. Like the ACA, it imposed a mandate requiring that everyone buy an acceptable level of coverage. Also like the ACA, it proposed subsidies to make sure that everyone could in fact afford that coverage. That’s two legs of the three-legged stool.

Where the plan differed was in the handling of pre-existing conditions. Butler opposed community rating, viewing it as an indirect tax on the healthy – but called instead for big subsidized high-risk pools to cover those private insurers would otherwise shun. I have real doubts about whether this would have been workable. But two things about it are notable. (1) The Heritage plan would have required bigger, not smaller, government spending; that is, on-budget outlays would have been larger. (2) The piece of the ACA Heritage didn’t want was the part that’s actually most popular with the public.

Overall, what’s striking about the Heritage plan is that it’s not notably more conservative than what Obama actually implemented: a bit less regulation, a substantial amount of additional spending. If Obamacare is an extreme leftist measure, as so many Republicans claim, the Heritage Foundation in the 1980s was a leftist institution.