If you though that — after the Obama administration met its target of seven million new private insurance signups under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and after disproving pretty much every Obamacare “horror story,” and after even some conservatives are “telling their brethren to stop fooling themselves into thinking the ACA will inevitably implode” — the nation could start having “a reasonable, factually grounded discussion about how we might improve the ACA going forward,” think again.
As a matter of fact, the Obamacare haters are getting ready to double-down with even more outrageous — and dishonest — horror stories about Obamacare.
That is basically the message and warning Paul Waldman has in his Washington Post piece “The next GOP scheme to manufacture Obamacare ‘horror stories’”
This new horror story is about how workers’ hours are being cut back so their employers won’t have to comply with the ACA’s employer mandate.
And just like clockwork, the decisions of private companies to “screw over” their workers will be blamed on Obamacare and not on those companies, Waldman predicts.
To make matters worse — and to screw Obamacare — the House passed a bill yesterday “with every Republican voting in favor (along with 18 conservative Democrats) changing the law’s definition of full-time work from 30 hours a week to 40 hours a week. The purpose is to allow an employer to cut a full-time worker down to 39 hours and claim they’re ‘part time,’ to avoid giving them health coverage (as it stands now, they’d have to cut them down to 29 hours)” Waldman notes.
While Waldman admits that he doesn’t believe that workers should be getting insurance through their employers “at all,” he has the integrity to demand honesty and fairness:
As long as this is the system we have and there’s a mandate scheduled to take effect in 2016, we should be honest about what it means. If the claims about people getting dropped from individual coverage have taught us anything, it’s that whenever we see a new “Obamacare horror story,” it’s probably bogus. And this one will be no exception.
So look for the next series of “bigger and better” Obamacare horror stories at your local newsstand, on TV or on your computer — they are sure to come, as Obamacare haters are running out of time and facts.
Read more here and watch out.
Lead image: www.shutterstock.com
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.