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Our own Dr. Ron Chusid has been doing a superb job of covering the good things about the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the problems and shortcomings where they occur and have occurred and, perhaps most important in this dog-eat-dog climate, he has doggedly been exposing and rebutting the shameful right-wing lies, villainous distortions and brazen slander about this hugely important program.
There are so many lies, distortions and so much slander, that it would be impossible for Dr. Chusid to address them all.
But he has some help.
Today, that help comes from Ezra Klein who writes in Vox today, “In conservative media, Obamacare is a disaster. In the real world, it’s working.”
In his column, Klein starts out with some key findings released Tuesday by Human Services Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell. Findings that totally shatter the right-wing hopes that ACA “would collapse as insurers shunned the overpriced, overregulated insurance exchanges.”
What are some of those key findings? “In the 44 states where numbers were available, the number of companies offering plans in 2015 would increase by 25 percent. So, far from fleeing the exchanges, insurers are rushing into them. Competition is increasing.”
Klein then quotes some the sky-is-falling, right-wing predictions from the recent past:
“More Insurers Drop Out Of Exchanges,” warned Fox Business. “Three Major Insurers Flee California’s Obamacare Exchange,” said HotAir.com. “The President’s health care law has almost completely failed to increase insurance market competition,” wrote the Heritage Foundation.
“It continued after the law’s launch. I remember, a month or two after HealthCare.gov opened (and crashed), being on a panel with a conservative writer who said that Obamacare might well enter a death spiral as insurers pull out of the marketplaces,” Klein says, and he notes:
This news is not, as I write this on Tuesday evening, being carried on the home pages of Fox Business, HotAir.com, or the Heritage Foundation. (In case you’re wondering, the most recent Obamacare article on FoxBusiness.com is “Obamacare website still not secure?”; on Hot Air.com, it’s “How many people are poised to lose 2014 Obamacare coverage?”; at Heritage, it’s “Why you can’t keep your plan under Obamacare, explained in 3 minutes.”
To prove that in the debate about “Obamacare,” the two sides “live in different informational universes,” Klein posts a list of 15 doomsday, mostly false or exaggerated headlines from a Conservative source about Obamacare and the economy.
Under the sub-headings listed below, Klein discusses how easy it is for Republicans to distort Obamacare, a huge program where, at any given moment, “there are some good things happening in it and some bad things happening in it. If you run multiple articles every day on the problems and nothing on the broader trends, it’s easy to mislead your audience.”
• ARTICLES DON’T NEED TO PLAY TRICKS TO PAINT A GRIM PICTURE FOR OBAMACARE
• IF ALL YOU’RE SEEING IS AN ENDLESS PROCESSION OF STORIES THAT SEEM TO SHOW OBAMACARE IS A DISASTER, YOU’RE GOING TO THINK OBAMACARE IS A DISASTER
• IF OBAMACARE WERE ROMNEYCARE DOES ANYONE DOUBT RYAN WOULD BE CELEBRATING?
Klein concludes:
On the whole, though, costs are lower than expected, enrollment is higher than expected, the number of insurers participating in the exchanges is increasing, and more states are joining the Medicaid expansion. Millions of people have insurance who didn’t have it before. The law is working. But a lot of the people who are convinced Obamacare is a disaster will never know that, because the voices they trust will never tell them.
What a sad commentary on our political debate.
Please keep us posted — and honest — Dr. Chusid.
Read it all here.
Lead image: shutterstock.com
