Now that Obamacare is up and... well, limping, we see the right-wing media pulling out all the stops to develop a narrative based on testimonials from "real 'murricans" suffering harm from expanded access to health insurance ("real 'murricans" being Fox "News" viewers who don't know s**t from Shinola):
Strangely, the recent shutdown was based almost entirely on a small percentage of Congress’s belief that Obamacare, as Ted Cruz puts it, “is destroying America.” Cruz has rarely given us an example of what he’s talking about. That’s because the best he can do is what Hannity did—exploit people’s ignorance and falsely point to imaginary boogeymen.The Salon piece does a good job of debunking the stories (literally) being told by these low-information shills. C and L also did a little checking on a story being told on the
Ashley Dionne, a recent guest on Mike Huckabee's show, claimed that her insurance premiums would jump from $75 per month to $319 per month for her family. She proclaimed the act to be the "Unaffordable Care Act" and went even further, claiming her future and that of her children had been 'raped.'
Unfortunately, someone forgot to mention to Ashley that her premiums were offset with subsidies, so she would really pay $223 per YEAR as well as receiving assistance with copayments. Oops.Of course, should one confront these people with something called "The Facts," their tiny, prejudiced heads might explode (something probably not covered by Obamacare). Or as Digby puts it:
Honestly, if these people are such ideologues that they haven't even checked if they will benefit from the reforms before complaining about them on national television then fuck them. They can pay full market price and help subsidize the rest of us.Amen.
