The Republican War On The Truth: Obamacare Edition

While more popular perceptions of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare!) may be slowly changing the political narrative, Paul Krugman writes that Republicans haven't given up -- not by a long shot -- in their attempt to reinvent it as a failure:

[We] can be fairly sure that Republican leaders know perfectly well that Obamacare has failed to fail. But the party faithful don’t. Like anyone who writes about these issues, I get vast amounts of mail from people who know, just know, that insurance premiums are skyrocketing, that far more people have lost insurance because of Obummercare than have gained it, that all the horror stories are real, and that anyone who says otherwise is just a liberal shill. 

Beyond that, the constant harping on alleged failure works as innuendo even if each individual claim collapses in the face of evidence. A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a majority of Americans know that more than eight million people enrolled in health exchanges; but it also found a majority of respondents believing that this was below expectations, and that the law was working badly.  (our emphasis)

Left unsaid is the truth that there's another culprit at work helping Republicans and their plutocrat backers =cough= Koch brothers =cough= catapult their lies into the public arena.  You guessed it:  the "mainstream media."  If the media spent as much time debunking-- if not deflecting in the first place -- those Republican lies, we might have a more informed public that would see that the law is succeeding despite a bungled launch, and that millions of Americans now and in the future will benefit from it. But as long as we have "the Chuck Todd maxim" operating, we shouldn't expect enlightenment from these Republican-wired stenographers.

Oh, by the way, Obamacare is working and is here to stay.

Pols and Pundits: Betting on Obamacare Failing, And Losing

Pardon our indulging in a little more schadenfreude over the success of Obamacare in its first enrollment cycle.  After years of gibberish about "death panels," tripling insurance premiums, beellions being kicked off of their insurance plans, deficit busting, and the end of Freedom in America (courtesy of right-wing media, the Koch brothers and other lying malefactors), we have millions more Americans being covered by affordable health insurance.  While the dead-ender right isn't finished with Obamacare (and will never give up), they may yet pay a price for going all-in on opposing this humane and decent achievement.  Here are snippets of some worthwhile readings:

Greg Sargent:

The announcement of eight million Obamacare sign-ups may finally be enough to jolt commentators into realizing that maybe, just maybe, the Republican plan to build an entire campaign against the law for the next six months might suffer from a few imperfections. The President, for his part, seized on the moment to urge Democratic candidates to stand proudly by the law’s achievements — and to attack Republicans for wanting to strip them away.

Josh Marshall:

On Obamacare, the Republican party has bet big on failure for four years. Now the results are in. And they lost. Big time. 

Of course, substance policy success and political outcomes aren't the same thing. And just as importantly they do not always run on the same time scale. So it is entirely possible. I would say it is likely that the GOP will still derive benefits this November from the core of voters who are extremely upset about Obamacare, extremely motivated to vote and also happen to be the same people who routinely turn out in disproportionate numbers in mid-term elections. But on the core of the policy, which I think there is good reason to believe will align with political outcomes in the future, the results are in. And they lost. 

And, finally, Lucia Graves at the National Journal calls out specific Republican journalists pundits who, in toeing the hyperbolic party line on Obamacare, are seeing their predictions of doom blow up in their smug faces.  The list of numbnuts is much longer than Graves has space or patience to cover, unfortunately =cough= Fox "News" =cough= Krauthammer =cough= Will =cough=.  Of course, the "mainstream media" is/was often complicit in peddling Republican lies in their typical "he-said, she-said" narratives (because,  as NBC's  Chuck Todd has schooled us, it's not the media's job to sort out the truth!). Nonetheless, history will surely and righteously enroll all of them in its Book of Shame.

Quote of the Day

"...it’s one of the key rules of lazy political journalism that Republicans are the heartland and by definition can’t be out of touch with it (rules dreamed up, by the way, mostly by people from the Eastern seaboard who went to private universities and haven’t the slightest idea in the world about the actual heartland). Only Democrats can be. That’s how it can come to pass that liberals and Democrats can be defending a law whose major provisions enjoy broad support, and a law that most Americans have come around to accepting as a part of life that they’ll learn to live with, and be called out of touch."  -- Michael Tomasky, in The Daily Beast, writing as the number of people signing up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act surges. (emphasis added).

Regardless of what the Rethuglican-wired Beltway media is peddling on "Obamacare," millions of people now have health insurance for the first time that doesn't disappear when they get sick, that doesn't deny them coverage due to a preexisting condition, and that they can afford.  As Tomasky points out in his article, the majority of the public doesn't want the law repealed, and favors the key policies of the law by a large margin.  Now, the Rethugs won't stop their attacks -- they still want to gut Medicare after almost 50 years -- but at some point the Beltway media might want to check outside their bubble.

Saturday Reading - Rooting For Failure

Today, of course, is the target date imposed by the Obama Administration for many fixes to the HealthCare.gov web site to enable more people to successfully sign up for affordable health insurance.  Who's that cheering from the sidelines, and what are cheering for? Tim Egan in the New York Times explains:

It’s hard to remember a time when a major political party and its media arm were so actively rooting for fellow Americans to lose. When the first attempt by the United States to launch a satellite into orbit, in 1957, ended in disaster, did Democrats start to cheer, and unify to stop a space program in its infancy? Or, when Medicare got off to a confusing start, did Republicans of the mid-1960s wrap their entire political future around a campaign to deny government-run health care to the elderly?

Of course not. But for the entirety of the Obama era, Republicans have consistently been cheerleaders for failure. They rooted for the economic recovery to sputter, for gas prices to spike, the job market to crater, the rescue of the American automobile industry to fall apart.

The Republican media arm (Fox "News" and the rest of NewsCorp., of course) has been getting a lot of help from other corporate media, who react to the smell of blood in the water and love a good "government fails again" story as much as any Rupert Murdoch entity.  But the early, very unfortunate mis-steps on the Federal web site may not be as painful a memory in the spring or summer of 2014.  With potentially millions of Americans successfully subscribed to affordable health insurance by then, and with health care costs slowing for the great majority, the Failure Chorus on the right and in the media may end up being drowned out by the Hallelujah Chorus of newly insured Americans.  Let's withhold judgement until then, at least.

Media Ninnies and Republicans' Worst Nightmare

A propos of the posting below, this commentary triptych comes courtesy of Daily Kos.

Paul Begala:

[D]espite the bed-wetting from Beltway Chicken Littles, the President's problems are eminently fixable. The Affordable Care Act isn't collapsing. The Obama presidency isn't imploding. And the ninnies making those sweeping and stupid predictions will one day look like the Washington pundit who boldly declared of the Clinton presidency, "This week we can talk about 'Is the presidency over?' " He asked that question 11 days after Bill Clinton's inaugural. His first inaugural. Clinton's presidency was not over for another 2,911 days.

 Noam Levey:

Despite the disastrous rollout of the federal government's healthcare website, enrollment is surging in many states as tens of thousands of consumers sign up for insurance plans made available by President Obama's health law.

A number of states that use their own systems, including California, are on track to hit enrollment targets for 2014 because of a sharp increase in November, according to state officials.

Kevin Drum:

It really is all about the website. In places where it's working, people are signing up and are pretty happy with what they're getting. Rate shock is an issue for a few of them, but not for a lot. The bottom line is the Republican Party's worst nightmare: Once Obamacare has been up and running for a while, it's going to be pretty popular.

Time, indeed, for Democrats and progressives generally to come out of their crouch on health care reform and start punching back hard against the New Confederate/ Republican/ Stupid Party and their media enablers.

BONUS:  Just for good measure, Michael Hilzick:

... the myth of Obamacare’s “failure” is a product of the same Republican noise machine that has been working to undermine this crucial reform since Day One. It’s assisted by news reporting about canceled health policies that typically ranges from woefully misinformed to spectacularly ignorant, and even at its best is incomplete.

Indeed, the spectacle of Democrats panicking over bad news on Obamacare resembles the herds of giraffes one sees on the Serengeti being stampeded by swarms of tsetse flies. Here’s a lesson the giraffes could teach the Dems: Stampeding leads only to injuries and death, and doesn’t solve the tsetse fly problem…

Health Insurers' Games Continue

We're reading that some health insurance companies have been sending out misleading letters regarding their customers' options relating to the Affordable Care Act, specifically warning that their current (junk) plans will be cancelled unless they convert to more expensive plans offered by the company, without noting that consumers can shop for more affordable plans on the exchanges.  Of course, they're able to get away with this in large part because the Federal "HealthCare.gov" mess isn't providing access to more competitive policies, so the consumer isn't able to "shop around" and determine whether they're eligible for subsidies unless they're living in one of the States that has an up-and-running State exchange.

There's no way to repair the initial damage and valuable time lost on health insurance reform from the incompetent roll-out of the health reform effort, but over time, the Administration might be able to drive these junk policy insurers out of business while providing access to affordable private health insurance to tens of millions of more Americans.

BONUS:   The media, as usual, is part of the problem.

Media Fails to Cover Rulings Upholding Health Reform

As we predicted, the "mainstream" media hasn't been so fair and balanced in reporting the three rulings upholding the constitutionality of the health reform act, versus the two that didn't. They need to be careful not to get a hernia carrying so much Rethuglican water.

(Image: Politico, AP and the Kaplan Daily)

Reagan Solicitor General: Health Care Mandate Constitutional

Testifying today before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Reagan Solicitor General Charles Fried said he was "quite sure the health care mandate is constitutional." Fried, who currently is a professor of law at Harvard, went on to say that the argument that health care regulation is not regulation of commerce (which is permitted by the Constitution) is "entirely wrong and even worse quite confused."

Watch this get lost in the "mainstream media," which is continuing the role of Rethug lie-enabler that it established for itself during the year the health care debate was raging. How so? As Steve Benen shows (via Kos), the media is giving much more attention to the two rulings against the health care law than to the two rulings that declared it constitutional. Fairly unbalanced I would say.

Ordure in the Court

As Steve Benen notes, from coverage in the mainstream media, you'd think that all of the Federal court cases regarding the health insurance reform law have been decided in favor of the Rethuglican position. In reality, two have been opposed, and two have upheld the law. In the most recent one, Federal District Judge Roger "Rogered" Vinson went far beyond the norm in ruling the entire law unconstitutional, as opposed to just the individual mandate requirement. Judge Rogered was appointed by none other than St. Ronnie of Hollywood, so his partisan leanings should be pretty clear. But why has the media Village played up the "losses" and downplayed (or not covered) the "wins" in the courts for the law? For the same reason they fail to fact check right wing fables on every subject: a mixture of solidarity with the righties and plain old laziness.