Republican False Narrative On The Failure Of The Affordable Care Act

Timothy Egan wrote about the South’s new lost cause. He started with how Abraham Lincoln lied in his inaugural address of 1861, essentially telling the South that if they liked their slaves they could keep them:

The comparisons of President Obama to Lincoln fade with every day of the shrinking modern presidency. As for the broken-promise scale: Lincoln said an entire section of the country could continue to enslave more than one in three of its people. Obama wrongly assured about five million people that they could keep their bare-bones health plans if they liked them (later amended when it turned not to be true).

As inapt as those comparisons are, what is distressingly similar today is how the South is once again committed to taking a backward path. By refusing to expand health care for the working poor through Medicaid, which is paid for by the federal government under Obamacare, most of the old Confederacy is committed to keeping millions of its own fellow citizens in poverty and poor health. They are dooming themselves, further, as the Left-Behind States.

And they are doing it out of spite. Elsewhere, the expansion of Medicaid, the health care program for the poor, has been one of the few success stories of Obamacare. It may be too complicated for the one-dimensional Beltway press. Either that, or it doesn’t fit the narrative of failure.

Of course conservatives cherry pick facts to support their narrative, and ignore all those which contradict their views. For example. how do problems with a web site (which are being fixed) have any impact as to whether we should be concerned about providing affordable health care to all Americans?

Russell Simmons wonders about the same thing. First he described the Republican view:

I know where Republicans stand. They have voted 47 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act, so their stance is clear. If you get sick, you’re on your own. If you can’t pay for your medical expenses, declare bankruptcy. If you have a pre-existing condition, they’ll send you a get well card when you’re on your death-bed. Whatever President Obama stands for, they stand for the opposite. Even if it goes against every principle they have advocated for in the past, they would rather destroy our country, than see President Obama pass policy that is good for ALL Americans.

He next criticized Democrats who are backing down in fear, listening to the Republican narrative of failure, and argued that the web site will be fixed:

I run websites. I have built websites. I certainly understand the complications of servers and load times and 404 errors. THIS CAN ALL BE FIXED! And it will be fixed. But what cannot be fixed, is the fact that for over 100 years we have tried to reform our healthcare system, and EVERY President before Barack Obama FAILED! Yes, we initially wanted single payer, and we had to compromise back in 2009 for the Affordable Care Act. But, it is a damn good piece of legislation that has already saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. So, let us not give up now.  (**addendum: After getting attacked by the right wing blogs yesterday for my comments, let me remind them that Obamacare did not start with the website on October 1st.  It started when it was passed in 2009.  And since that time, 2.5 MILLION more young people have health insurance because they can stay on their parent’s plan until they are 26.  And since 2010, health insurance companies could no longer deny health insurance to children because of a pre-existing condition. That has been the law before the website even launched.)

Conservative sites are further spreading misinformation by citing how United Health Care has been dropping patients and doctors as if this is an argument against Obamacare. United Health Care has engaged in such practices for years. Their actions are not an argument against Obamacare. They are examples as to why the Affordable Care Act is needed.