While the fuss over Obamacare has died down a recently leaked memo, penned by GOP leader Eric Cantor, clearly shows the Republicans exploited a common insurance company practice to drum up phony outrage on the healthcare law, showing how the fuss began in the first place and just where it will go next, once it inevitably resurfaces.
Cantor’s “Playbook” contains all the talking points, put together in big bold type, easy to digest single paragraph explanations and contains quotes from late night comedians, all in an attempt to frame the ultimate talking point argument against the Affordable Care Act for their not-so-intelligent messengers. They also contradict their own argument numerous times, especially on “Pre-Existing Conditions” which Obamacare has outlawed, yet somehow, they manage to dig up people that will benefit from the law to kill the law. It’s pure sophistry.
They also cite figures that are from before the health care law, unrelated to the health care law and just plan deceptive. For instance, they cite that health care spending increased by 1.3% since 2010, proof that the health care law is raising insurance costs right? Wrong! Because it’s the lowest growth in health care spending since 1965! See how they operate?
Plus insurance companies routinely cancel plans every year and kick people off of plans that consumers may like because they are no longer profitable. The ACA protects that from happening too, though the vast majority of people losing their insurance had junk, according to right-leaning Forbes, at least 4 million people were covered by the kind sold on late night TV that couldn’t cover your head in a rainstorm, let alone in a medical emergency. Others were so bad they were really only good as long as you didn’t use it because God help you if you actually needed it. All of these numbers were lumped in with a couple “tragic” stories where some older person, who most likely could afford better insurance, but was cheap, managed to have a plan they liked but was canceled because of some bureaucratic technicality.
Plus insurance companies had the choice to keep many of the cancelled plans alive. Guess what? They figured it was cheaper to issue cancellation letters that failed to tell people to sign up at the HealthCare.gov or their state’s local website. Gee I wonder why? Did Republicans mention that insurance companies are complicit in this affair? Nope. Did they mention that these under-insured people often end up passing their debts on to the taxpayers and other insurance payees because their lack of preventive care ends up leading to expensive illnesses they can’t afford to pay? Nope. Personal responsibility? Republicans only agree with that when it means kicking people off of food stamps!
The Roughly 5 Million people who will not get health care thanks to the Republicans
They also left out the part that Republican Governors in mostly Red States refused to accept Federal money to expand Medicaid, ultimately leaving 5 million people without coverage. Must have slipped their mind!
Even worse, many of the “victims” that Republicans, such as Sean Hannity’s, have trotted out were actually covered with cheaper plans under Obamacare, or could get better coverage for about the same cost. Yet many of them were not told this while the media and Republicans were exploiting them. Interesting how the corporate owned media drummed up the phony scandal, isn’t it?
Obamacare is not the single-payer system I wanted. Market based solutions are a conservative idea and the ACA was conceived by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, in response to Clintoncare, and first tried by Republican Mitt Romney. Yet something had to be done and this is the best we could get. The spiteful Joe Lieberman squashed the expansion of Medicare by putting his lone vote into the basket with every single Republican who opted to do nothing for health care. They have yet to come up with a credible plan. What they have offered is essentially Obamacare without the insurance mandate that makes it work in the first place.
It is also unacceptable that the website is not operating better than it should. Though in the website’s defense, I was able to easily sign up at the California website CoveredCa.com. Seriously, it took me 5 minutes. If the Red States had done what they were supposed to do and not rely on the Federal Government to do it for them, there wouldn’t be this mess. So I attempted to sign up through Healthcare.gov and it seemed to work for me. It took a while to get the email, but it worked on the first try. No errors or anything. Funny, John Boehner tried to show that sign-up was still failing, but unfortunately for him, it worked too!
Roll outs of big programs like this are usually a little rough. The best and most similar example, Romneycare, was not smooth as some try to say now. Some say it was a mess!
Social Security was anything but smooth as well. They hadn’t figured out the Social Security number idea yet, and many people didn’t have birth certificates because they were not born in hospitals.
Yet they got through that, and we will get through this too. Provided we ignore the lunatics who will say anything to get their way and bring nothing constructive, or even honest, to the national dialogue.