Healthcare

Fox News Hypes PolitiFact’s Lie Of The Year, One Week After Saying Never Trust PolitiFact

Posted by on December 13, 2013 at 1:09 pm. 20 Comments :

It’s time once again for the unveiling of the “Lie of the Year” by the fact-checkers at PolitiFact. This year the dis-honoree is President Barack Obama for his promotional assurance that under the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

Pretty much everybody, including Obama, now concedes that making such a blanket statement was unwise and unsustainable. There were signs early on that some plans would be terminated because they fell so far below the standards for acceptable coverage that they were effectively useless. Obama could have made small modifications to the statement that would have been easier to defend, such as: “if you like your health care plan, what the fuck are you thinking?” However, I’m pretty sure that comment wouldn’t have made it past the first draft.

The whole concept of liking one’s health care plan is rather comical to begin with. How often have you ever heard someone bring up in casual conversation how much they liked their health insurance provider? Insurance companies are rarely the object of much affection. Especially for those who get their coverage from the private market rather than from an employer. And that small subset of the population (about 5%) is all that is affected by this.

Whether or not the President’s statement deserved to be the “Lie of the Year” is subject to debate, just as every year’s selection is. But it is notable that PolitiFact’s explanation for their choice began by saying that…

“It was a catchy political pitch and a chance to calm nerves about his dramatic and complicated plan to bring historic change to America’s health insurance system.

‘If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,’ President Barack Obama said — many times — of his landmark new law.

“But the promise was impossible to keep.”

A promise, of course, is completely different than a lie. If it was the President’s intention to deliver on the promise, but in the course of legislative compromises and flawed implementation it failed to materialize as expected, than it was not actually a lie at all. But it is obvious that PolitiFact’s analysis is aimed at the distance of the intention from the outcome, not the veracity of the statement itself. And that’s fine since most people apply the same reasoning with regard to the truthiness of a public figure. Also, Obama didn’t help himself by initially trying to defend or rewrite his original comment. Although he does get credit for eventually owning up, apologizing, and taking steps to correct the matter.

The selection of this statement by the President is certain get a lot of attention from the press, particularly the conservative media that eats it up whenever they can shine a spotlight on presidential missteps. Therefore, it’s no surprise that Fox News has leaped to the front of the line to hype PolitiFact’s findings. Ironically, it was Fox Nation that was first out of the gate with a simple headline at the top of their page saying “Politifact: Lie of the Year!”

Fox Nation LOTY

Coming from a website that has been documented to be riddled with lies (see Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Community’s Assault On Truth) obliterates any moral authority they have to disparage the honesty of others. What’s more, the impact of their reporting might have been greater had they not posted this headline just last week: “Never Trust Politifact Again.”

Fox Nation Never Trust

To recap: On November 5, Fox admonishes its audience to never trust PolitiFact, and on November 13, one week later, they feature a PolitiFact ruling at the top of their website. This really says more about Fox than it does about PolitiFact, or even Obama.

For the record, while PolitiFact selected Obama’s comment as their “Lie of the Year,” they also posted the runners-up. It is not unreasonable to expect the winner to get the majority of the attention from the media, however, there is a notable trend amongst the year’s other lies that ought not to be dismissed. Most conspicuously that out of the remaining nine lies in the top ten, eight of them are from republicans or conservatives.

  • Ann Coulter: No doctors who went to an American medical school will be accepting Obamacare.
  • Betsy McCaughey: Obamacare will question your sex life.
  • Bloggers: Obamacare provision will allow “forced home inspections” by government agents.
  • Ted Cruz: Says “President Obama just granted all of Congress an exception” to Obamacare.
  • Chain email: A United Nations working group has “adopted a proposed agenda” to enable member nations to “disarm civilians within their borders.”
  • Barack Obama: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court “is transparent.”
  • Saxby Chambliss: The United States has never stood by and seen innocent people slaughtered to the extent that’s happening in Syria.
  • Chain email: Says the word “Dhimmitude” is on page 107 of the health care law and means “Muslims are specifically exempted from the government mandate to purchase insurance.”
  • Michele Bachmann: The IRS is going to be “in charge” of “a huge national database” on health care that will include Americans’ “personal, intimate, most close-to-the-vest-secrets.”

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So while Obama may have captured the big trophy for the year, conservative liars were far more prolific in fabricating and disseminating disinformation in pursuit of an agenda that they obviously don’t believe merits honest discourse. It illustrates a pattern of behavior that marks the right-wing as incorrigibly deceitful and wholly untrustworthy. At least President Obama apologized, a gesture that is foreign to the unprincipled cretins on the right.

A Very Fox News Thanksgiving: Bash Your Stupid, Obnoxious, Liberal Relatives

Posted by on November 28, 2013 at 11:40 am. 20 Comments :

On this traditional day of unity, family, and the fellowship of all people, Fox News has embarked on a media blitz more in keeping with the hostility and boorishness that is the hallmark of American conservatism.

On the Fox News community website, Fox Nation, they have taken great umbrage at reports that a Democratic organization is encouraging people to take the opportunity during Thanksgiving to have conversations with their friends and family about the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) and rebut the many myths they may have picked up from dishonest sources like Fox News.

The Fox Nationalists featured a headline story criticizing Organizing For America’s lighthearted “Have the Talk” website for “pushing turkey table talking points.” However, they must have forgotten their own efforts to do the very same thing, only more often, more politicized, and more insulting.

Fox Nation

If you haven’t already got your copy of the acclaimed ebook,
Fox Nation vs. Reality, this might be a good time.

The OFA campaign is merely a suggestion that people discuss matters of importance in a civilized way. They emphasize that the point is to convey that you care about the health of those you love. Contrast that with the tone of Fox News conservatives who portray liberal relatives as stupid, obnoxious, and something you must “survive.” The language in the articles includes additional vile and childish statements that demean their supposedly loved ones who “won’t stop spouting vapid Democratic talking points,” and who should “keep your stupid mouth shut,” because “they aren’t buying OFA’s ObamaCare baloney.”

Now, isn’t that in keeping with the spirit of the season? And somehow, these hate-filled right-wingers think that they have a monopoly on patriotism, traditional holidays, and family values.

The hypocrisy of the right continues to demonstrate that it has no bounds. They will shamelessly smear their perceived enemies for sins they themselves commit repeatedly. They even show contempt for their own families. And while invoking the name of God on holidays that they regard as sacred, they brazenly lie, disparage their neighbors, and seek to divide the nation on the one day that most epitomizes its mission of unity. Happy Holidays from Fox News.

Fox News Guest Distorts Martin Luther King Quote To Attack ObamaCare

Posted by on November 26, 2013 at 8:02 am. 1 Comments :

The naysayers at Fox News have been working overtime to cripple the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) by inventing controversies, spinning nightmares, and just outright lying. Then, when it seems that they have traversed a line that extinguishes all manner of decency, they manage to go a step further.

In yesterday’s episode of America’s Newsroom, host Bill Hemmer introduced a debate segment with a putrid old clip of Joe the Plumber (whose name is not Joe and is not a plumber) and the deliberately misrepresented remarks of then-candidate Obama talking about the benefits of growing the middle class. At the time, Fox News twisted his words into a socialist credo of redistribution of wealth when all he was saying was the same thing folks like Ronald Reagan said about a rising tide lifting all boats.

Fox News

The segment (video below) featured right-wing radio talker Mike Slater who took liberties with the words of Martin Luther King from his iconic essay, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” In an effort to condemn the egalitarian aspirations of making health care accessible to all American citizens, Slater mangled King’s words saying…

“Here’s the bottom line. The ends do not justify the means. Martin Luther King, Jr. said ‘You cannot achieve a moral end — helping people — through an immoral means — taking from people.’ The left’s solution is always to take from people to help another group. That’s lazy.”

What anyone familiar with King’s famous essay will immediately recognize is that Slater’s butchered version of the quote where he references “helping people” and “taking from People” do not exist in the original. What King actually said was…

“I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends.”

King was reiterating his long held belief in nonviolence and the need to maintain that in the face of increasing hostility from bigots and misguided southern law enforcement officials. It certainly had nothing to do with Slater’s skewed characterization that it is somehow wrong for government policies to help people. Taken literally, Slater’s view would eliminate Social Security, public schools, fire departments, child nutrition programs, and more.

Slater’s intentional distortion is even more ironic when you know that King’s next line was “But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.” King might as well have been speaking directly to Slater who was using the moral ideas expressed by King for the immoral purpose of deception and advocacy of the sort of selfishness that King despised.

Unfortunately, Slater’s debate opponent, Leslie Marshall, was unprepared for Slater’s misquoting of King. She nevertheless responded earnestly saying “I think MLK would be rolling in his grave. If a child has cancer and they couldn’t get insurance, I don’t think that’s immoral, I think it’s quite the opposite to provide that.”

For the record, King was an advocate of health care access for all. In 1966 he told a conference in Chicago that “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” Had Slater and Fox News made that quote available to their viewers they would have gone farther toward realizing the moral ends of which King spoke. But true to form, Fox was focused solely on advancing their own rightist agenda that only benefits the privileged.

Torture Advocate On Fox News Says “ObamaCare Is No Katrina, It’s Much Worse”

Posted by on November 21, 2013 at 1:10 pm. 17 Comments :

Absurd and asinine analogies have been swirling for weeks by critics of the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare). They have compared it to Watergate, to slavery, to Iraq, and relentlessly to Hurricane Katrina. Their arguments are ridiculous and transparently political.

It is certainly within the realm of reason to oppose ObamaCare and articulate a case for pursuing a different solution to expand access to health care and lower costs for patients, businesses, and government. The only problem with that is that Republicans have no other solution. They are so fixated on repealing ObamaCare that they can’t be bothered with developing a plan that might actually help the American people. And in the process they are resorting to epic levels of overkill in order to characterize a glitchy website as the end of western civilization.

However, it’s one thing to employ hyperbole to advance a political agenda, and another to recruit a notoriously controversial figure to elevate that hyperbole to heretofore unspeakable heights. Yet that’s what Fox News has done by giving former Bush Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo, a platform to make grotesque assertions that diminish the tragic loss of life and property in the Gulf Coast due to Hurricane Katrina.

obamacare-katrina

For those who don’t recall, Yoo is the author of the Bush administration’s legal justification for what they euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation,” but which the rest of the world calls torture. For someone who has advocated the use of barbaric tactics that have been denounced by the United Nations and the World Court, to compare health insurance reform to a natural disaster that took almost two thousand lives is reprehensible.

Yoo is probably the worst possible spokesman for this line of attack, given his resume. And he proves it with his opening argument that favorably differentiates Bush from Obama by saying that “Bush had to respond to unpredictable events,” such as “an act of war in Iraq.” Unpredictable? The act of war in Iraq was a deliberate, preplanned assault on a nation that had done nothing to incite it. The stipulated reasons for the invasion all turned out to be false. And the consequences for Iraq and the United States were costly in terms of both human life and actual expense. Yoo goes on to make this inexplicably inane assertion:

“Obama is hitting the shoals for the exact opposite reason. ObamaCare’s collapse does not result from an act of nature or the attacks of a foreign enemy. Instead, it is a perversely self-inflicted, man-made disaster that replaced the efficiency of the private markets with the tangle, confusion, and ideological bias of government bureaucracy.”

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Once again Yoo falsely implies that the war in Iraq emanated from “the attacks of a foreign enemy.” Then he makes the delusional and unsupported statement that the private insurance markets were performing efficiently. Of course, if they were there wouldn’t have been 48 million people who were unable to get insurance due to cost or rejection for preexisting conditions. There also wouldn’t have been millions more who were paying for plans that provided little in the way of security, and that could be terminated entirely when a claim was filed. But the most grating rhetoric in Yoo’s screed is the repeated portrayal of ObamaCare as a “disaster” on par with, even worse than, Hurricane Katrina.

It is impossible to overstate the idiocy of an opinion that ranks a failed website rollout as inferior to the incompetence that left thousands to needlessly die in a great American city. Yoo dishonors the memory of the victims and insults the survivors. But coming from someone whose most significant professional achievement was to justify the use of torture, perhaps we should not be surprised. Neither should we be surprised that Fox News would embrace this cretin and his inhumane philosophy.

How Fox News Links ObamaCare To Falling Into An Orchestra Pit

Posted by on November 14, 2013 at 1:17 pm. 8 Comments :

“If you have two guys on stage and one guy says ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls into the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?” ~ Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes

The “Orchestra Pit” theory of news programming by Roger Ailes perfectly describes the way much of the mainstream media, and particularly Fox News, responds to current events. Whatever angle they can wrench themselves into that results in producing more superfluous melodrama is the one they choose, regardless of how far that diverts from real substance or even reality (see Fox Nation vs. Reality for some flagrant assaults on truth).

Roger Ailes

Yesterday the administration released data on the number of people who enrolled in new health insurance plans made available by ObamaCare. In the first month there were 106,000 people who got new plans via Heathcare.gov and the state-based exchanges. Almost immediately that number was decried as a catastrophic failure by the media. However, very few reporters actually provided the necessary context within which to view this data. They leaped at the opportunity to bellow ignorantly about what they characterized as an insurmountable defeat. Bill O’Reilly and Charles Krauthammer even discussed the possibility that this would herald the end of liberalism.

A more thorough analysis of the data shows that the magnitude of the fiasco was not nearly as pronounced as the media declared. First of all, everyone knew that there were functional problems with the website that would hamper enrollments. So to register surprise when numbers were released that fell below estimates made a year ago is plainly dishonest. The lower figures were expected by everyone involved and the feigned shock illustrates the devotion that media has for hysterical theatricality.

Furthermore, the numbers are not even all that bad despite the botched technology. Comparing this rollout to the rollout of RomneyCare in Massachusetts shows a similar pattern wherein enrollments started out slowly and rapidly increased as it got closer to the deadline. The Washington Post reported last month that…

“Just 123 people signed up during the Bay State’s first month of open enrollment. By contrast, 20 percent of the first year’s 36,000 enrollees purchased coverage in the last month before an individual mandate penalty kicked in.”

It is also notable that the states that provided their own exchanges signed up many more people than those that failed to do so. For instance, Kentucky’s exchange signed up five times more citizens than its exchange-less neighbor, Tennessee. Of the “Four Corners” states (Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah), only Colorado has its own exchange. But it signed up three times the number of citizens as the other three combined. In fact, California’s exchange enrolled more citizens than all 36 exchange-less states combined. What’s more, many in the media are conveniently forgetting that the expansion of Medicaid is also a part of ObamaCare. And 400,000 Americans now have health insurance through Medicaid as a result. That brings the total to half a million.

By this measure, with four months left in the open enrollment period, ObamaCare is on track to meet or exceed its estimates so long as the website problems are resolved, or people have adequate access to alternatives. But another factor that comes into play is the relentless attacks on ObamaCare by Fox News and other right-wing media. The consequences of this coordinated effort to frighten the American people include both dissuading new enrollments and prodding Congress to push for crippling legislation to delay and/or defund the program. It’s a self-fulling prophecy of doom wherein critics blast ObamaCare as failing to meet expectations, act to disparage and dismantle it, and then complain when it falls short of inflated expectations. Extremist right-wingers have been working furiously to sabotage ObamaCare, and it is no coincidence that almost every state without an exchange has a Republican governor and legislature.

The downside of this unfolding of ObamaCare news is the allegedly poor rate of enrollment. And on that matter, Fox obsessively focuses on negative reports that characterize the program as having tripped and fallen into a bottomless (orchestra) pit. But the other newsmaker on the stage is Obama’s plan that has provided 48 million Americans with access to health care that they had been denied previously. This solves a problem that prior administrations, going back FDR, have tried and failed to solve.

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It is a historic achievement, but the media is fixated on the website that fell into the Orchestra Pit, while ignoring the far greater achievement of making health care accessible to millions. So thanks, Roger Ailes, for helping the press to neglect what is truly important in order to promote relative trivialities and misrepresentations, and thereby advancing your personal agenda of Tea Party extremism and callous insensitivity toward those less fortunate than you. Despite your campaign to destroy a program that will bring life-saving relief to millions of Americans, the people are going to discover the benefits of this innovation and reward those who delivered it – and punish those who tried to kill it.

Serial Liar, James O’Keefe, Releases Another Deceitfully Edited Video: ObamaCare Edition

Posted by on November 12, 2013 at 1:28 pm. 14 Comments :

Some people are just gluttons for punishment. Take James O’Keefe for instance. The petulant, wannabe ambush journalist has already been exposed as a purveyor of dishonest videos that are deceptively edited in order to slander his victims. He was caught trying to execute a perverse scheme to seduce a CNN reporter. He had to pay a $100,000 to settle a defamation suit brought by a former ACORN staffer. And he was convicted of criminal behavior in a stunt he tried to pull in Louisiana.

James O'KeefeSince then his projects have been few and even many of his former allies declined to promote them. But now he has a new video that purports to expose some malfeasance on the part of some ObamaCare “navigators” who are helping people to acquire health insurance. As I’ve noted before, O’Keefe’s inner sadist assures that his projects are almost always aimed at attacking people and programs that serve the less fortunate. That’s true in this case as well.

The ObamaCare association seems to have loosened up those who abandoned him in the past, including Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. However, his reputation for producing video fiction is fully intact. In the new video he sends in a shill to pretend to inquire about enrolling in a health care plan. In the process, the shill attempts to trick his unsuspecting victims into giving bad advice. However, we can’t know for sure whether they did that because the videos are so heavily edited that there is no way to discern the actual context. Also, the people O’Keefe’s shill spoke with weren’t certified navigators, but were in fact trainees. So the prospect of them making a few mistakes shouldn’t shock anyone.

In one case, though, it is apparent that the navigators did not do what O’Keefe accused them of doing. O’Keefe alleged that the navigators advised the shill to misrepresent his income. In reality, they simply told him to report on the ObamaCare website the same amounts he reported to the IRS. It’s his responsibility to file his income taxes honestly. But the conclusions drawn in the video conceal that. That’s just one example of how creative editing can distort the true picture of what occurred.

Given that Fox News is immersed in an obsessive campaign to cripple ObamaCare, they must have given the green light to O’Reilly to readmit O’Keefe into their good graces – sort of. O’Reilly devoted most of his opening segment to O’Keefe’s video, but without ever mentioning his name. That may have been wise considering the disrepute associated with O’Keefe and his band of dissemblers. O’Reilly only identified the video as the work of Project Veritas, which he helpfully explained to his viewers means “truth,” something with which O’Reilly and O’Keefe have limited experience.

Even Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze couldn’t post O’Keefe’s video without disclaiming that “It should be noted that the video is heavily edited and employs deceptive tactics in order to catch the navigators offering the shocking advice.” When Beck’s crew is disturbed by deceptive tactics, you know you’ve crossed a line that most charlatans never see in their whole lives.

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What’s worse, a United States senator, John Cornyn, Republican of Texas (where else?), also cited the O’Keefe video as evidence that ObamaCare needs to be stopped immediately. Cornyn said that “This behavior is unacceptable, and is yet another broken piece of a deeply flawed system. The Obama administration should stop this program immediately.” Obviously – if a trainee tells a dishonest, partisan shill something that isn’t quite accurate, in a video produced by a known liar and criminal, then an entire government program that was set up to help 48 million previously uninsured Americans get access to health care should be thrown out.

That’s the quality of the logic in use by Republican and Tea Party opponents of ObamaCare. And, as such, is more than ample justification for ignoring them completely. It also explains how the pathetically amateurish video fabrications of James O’Keefe get taken seriously by idiots in politics and the press.

[Update 11/14/2013] Another Fox News program is hyping the O’Keefe lies. Sean Hannity did a segment during which he also referred to Project Veritas as the video’s producer and never mentioned O’Keefe’s name. He also spewed other lies about the cost of the website, the navigators not getting background checks, and the scope of the people whose current plans will be terminated by insurance companies.

Tea Party Mullah Ted Cruz Thinks He Can Banish Obama From Texas

Posted by on November 7, 2013 at 3:14 pm. 39 Comments :

President Obama traveled to Texas this week to inform the citizens there that ObamaCare has benefits that specifically address their needs. Texas has the notorious distinction of being the state that has more uninsured residents than any other state in the country. A big chunk of that problem would be solved if Gov. Rick Perry and the state legislature would simply agree to expand their medicaid program to cover low income residents. It wouldn’t cost the state a single penny because it is paid for by the federal government.

Nevertheless, Perry has ruled out this expansion despite the fact that a million of his constituents will suffer needlessly due to his cynical politicization of health care. This will hurt real people who require medical attention who will not receive it, as well as people who manage to get care that they cannot afford, which will lead to financial hardships including home foreclosures and bankruptcies. Obama made reference to this dire situation in his address to the people of Dallas.

Obama: I think that all of you understand that there’s no state that actually needs this more than Texas. […] Across this state, you’ve got a million people — because this is a big state — a million people, citizens, who don’t have health insurance that could get health insurance right away if the state of Texas decided to take advantage of [Medicaid expansion].

The response from Texas senator Ted Cruz to this common sense proposal was typically arrogant and insensitive. It exposed a deeply held animus for the President and disrespect for the office.

Cruz: President Obama should take his broken promises tour elsewhere so Texans can continue focusing on the solutions that have allowed our state to become and remain the nation’s economic and job creation powerhouse.

Fox Nation - Ted Cruz
Correcting Fox Nation. More corrections can be found in the
ebook, Fox Nation vs. Reality

Where Cruz gets the idea that he has some authority to direct the President’s itinerary is unknown. However, what is even worse is his obliviousness to the tribulations of his fellow Texans. By focusing on the status of the state’s economy, Cruz drives home the point that the business class of Texas has prospered at the expense of working families. If Texas is such an economic success and job haven, then why are more of it’s residents struggling to get by without health insurance than any other state?

That’s a question that Cruz and Perry and the rest of the GOP Scrooges still refuse to answer. They have a no-cost solution available to them that would relieve the stress of millions, but they won’t accept it because of their overriding desire to sabotage the Obama presidency. Eventually they will have to explain that to voters.

Bill O’Reilly Is Cool If You Go Bankrupt Or Die Waiting Another Year For Health Care

Posted by on November 6, 2013 at 10:50 am. 4 Comments :

The Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) was passed three years ago, and in that time has already helped millions of people by setting standards for insurance coverage that prohibit discrimination for preexisting conditions, permit children to remain on their parents policies until they are 26 years old, mandating free preventative care, forbidding arbitrary cancellations, eliminating annual and lifetime limits, etc. And that’s before the introduction of the health care exchanges that provide better and less expensive plans to millions.

Bill O'Reilly
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The new law has already saved lives and the financial well being of many families and individuals. But that is of no concern to Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. On his Tuesday night program he debated Dr. Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who contributed to the development of both RomneyCare and ObamaCare (video below). O’Reilly began the discourse by asking how long insurance companies have been not insuring those with preexisting conditions. He then answered his own leading and manipulative question by saying that “It’s been, roughly, since the Revolutionary War,” and adding that one more year won’t matter. Dr. Gruber responded with the an observation that is all too frequently ignored by pundits and politicians who attack the ACA. But pay extra attention to O’Reilly’s retort.

Gruber: It’s easy for you to say, but you’re not someone who’s living every day with the risk of going bankrupt or dying because you don’t have insurance coverage.

O’Reilly: I’m talking about the greater good. I understand this suffering and if there’s any way that I personally can alleviate it, I will. I give beaucoup money to charity to try to relieve…The greater good is served by having a law that is being mandated, all right, imposed on the population, clear, number one, and functional, number two. And neither of those things are happening, doctor.

See? O’Reilly’s just standing up for the “greater good.” It’s perfectly acceptable for some families to lose their mothers or fathers or children if, in exchange, we can insure that there is a functional website to enroll others next year. That’s the greater good, isn’t it? So some families will will become homeless or have to spend their retirement savings on medical expenses. That isn’t nearly as important as avoiding Internet glitches or forcing people to enroll by telephone.

In almost every occurrence of some television blowhard criticizing ObamaCare’s flawed rollout, the critic is a wealthy member of a privileged class who never has to worry about access to health care. And like O’Reilly, they often reveal their callous insensitivity toward people who are less fortunate. O’Reilly trailed off in his self-congratulatory nod to his charitability without specifying how he personally relieves anyone’s suffering. Instead, he makes a judgment as to whether saving lives is even a worthy goal. And to compound his haughty arrogance, he demonstrates an embarrassing ignorance of the ACA’s scope.

Gruber: But Bill, you have to remember. This bill is not affecting the vast majority of the American population. That’s what’s getting lost is the fact that the vast majority of Americans getting their insurance from their employers or the government are not affected by this law.

O’Reilly: We don’t know that yet. The law is only about six weeks old. We don’t know that yet. But the evidence rolling in is that the suffering being caused by the law is much more intense than the help it is going to give.

Gruber: That’s absolutely wrong.

O’Reilly: All right. We have a gentleman’s disagreement on that.

What O’Reilly calls a gentleman’s disagreement is generally regarded as fundamental misunderstanding (or blatant misrepresentation) by rational observers. First of all, it is unarguably true that most Americans (over 80%) get their health insurance from their employers or governmental agencies like Medicare and the Veterans Administration. Secondly, the law is three years old, not six weeks. Like many ObamaCare critics, O’Reilly is mistaking the insurance marketplaces that just rolled out online as the whole of the program. Finally, O’Reilly didn’t bother to provide any details on the more intense suffering he alleged, most likely because there isn’t any truth to it.

However, if you’re looking for a public voice to advance support for functional websites at the expense of the health and economic security of millions of Americans, you have found your advocate in Bill O’Reilly – the Guardian of the Greater Good. [Note to O’Reilly: Isn’t the “Greater Good” a socialist concept?]

Red State Revenge: Fox News Floats New ObamaCare Conspiracy Theory

Posted by on November 5, 2013 at 2:52 pm. 17 Comments :

As previously reported here at News Corpse, the anti-ObamaCare zealots have deployed numerous attacks on the Affordable Care Act that are based on disinformation and deceit. Their offensive is still in full force as demonstrated by Fox News today.

Fox News

The latest phony issue to emerge on Fox News is the false allegation that the Obama administration is deliberately punishing red states that didn’t vote for him with higher premiums for health insurance. The article published on the Fox News website says that higher premiums are…

“…more likely if you live in a ‘red state’ that didn’t vote for Obama, according to price data compiled by the Heritage Foundation. In red states, premiums for 27-year-olds rose an average of 78% on ObamaCare exchanges, whereas in ‘blue states’ that voted for Obama, premiums rose a smaller 50%.”

Setting aside the fact that the Heritage Foundation is a disreputable right-wing think tank run by former GOP Sen. Jim DeMint, a fiercely biased opponent of ObamaCare, the data imparted in their “study” is far from accurate. What’s more, Fox gets support for their story from Avik Roy, a senior fellow at the rightist Manhattan Institute, which is funded by the Koch brothers.

The main problem with the numbers presented by Fox is that they do not include adjustments by the subsidies that are available to most insurance consumers purchasing plans through the ACA exchange. Roy dismisses that fact by saying that the subsidies will still cost the federal government money, but that doesn’t address the question at hand. Consumers will still be paying less, and those who live in red states will not be subject to any partisan penalty.

The other area that may affect the average prices paid by residents of specific states is the availability of expanded Medicaid service for low income residents. It’s true that these citizens will either have to pay more or go without insurance, but that isn’t the result of any retribution by the President. In fact, it is quite the opposite. All states can choose to expand their Medicaid programs to cover these people and be reimbursed by the federal government for the cost. Governors in blue states are doing just that. However, the republican governors of many red states have declined to take advantage of that benefit. So it is the GOP governors and legislatures who are depriving their residents of affordable coverage and inflating their state’s average costs.

By accusing Obama of orchestrating some sort of revenge against the residents of states that didn’t vote for him, Fox News is again advancing a dishonest argument in the hopes of doing harm to the public perception of ObamaCare, and to the reputation of Obama. There is absolutely no truth to the allegation that Obama has sought to punish residents of red states, and the ACA does no such thing. The American people see right through this cynical scheme as evidenced in a recent poll that shows that more people want ObamaCare to be expanded or remain as is, than want it to be repealed and/or replaced.

All of this leads back to a simple question asked in these pages before: If ObamaCare is as bad as they say it is, why do they have to keep lying about it?

The ObamaCare Bashing Media Fails To Turn The Public Against ObamaCare

Posted by on November 5, 2013 at 11:21 am. 4 Comments :

Ever since the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges opened a month ago, the media has been relentlessly hammering on every negative story they could find. They began with the famously glitchy rollout of the website. Then they shifted to allegations of increased premiums, complete with personal horror stories that turned out to be false. From there they segued to panicky assertions of plans being terminated, even when alternative plans were available that were better and cheaper. And that doesn’t even include some of the most delusional fear mongering over mythical criticisms the right-wing could invent.

Of course, Fox News was at the forefront of this effort to propagandize the nation into believing that there were no redeeming qualities to ObamaCare, but they were by no means alone. Most of the establishment media joined in the piling on to create an impression of utter chaos and failure.

Yet through it all the American people have managed to wade through the muck and learn for themselves whether the new initiative would be of benefit to them and their families. And the result is revealed in the latest survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation that shows unequivocally where most Americans stand on the issue.

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After weeks of persistent disparagement, criticism, and lies, by most of the mainstream media, and their associated pundits and politicians, 47% of the country favors expanding ObamaCare or keeping it as is, compared to only 37% who want to repeal and/or replace it. And this poll was taken well after the problem-plagued launch of the website.

The partisan divide is notably evident. Nearly 8 out of 10 Democrats support the law, while about three quarters of Republicans oppose it. And you can guess where the Republicans are getting the information they use to form their opinions.

The poll also shows that opinions about the plan have hardly budged throughout this year despite the overwhelmingly negative press. Currently 38% have a favorable view, while 44% have an unfavorable view, a mere six point difference. The poll does not break out how many of those who hold an unfavorable view are actually supporters of the law but think it should have been more expansive.

The bottom line is that, even though there has been a concerted effort by the media, and particularly the rabid right-wing faction, to turn people against ObamaCare, it has not worked. The millions of dollars spent, and the hundreds of hours of airtime devoted, has failed to produce the animosity toward the plan and the President that they were aiming for.

This is another indication of just how impotent the Fox News driven conservative propaganda machine is when measured by real-world results. They may have high ratings that consist of the right-wing choir that is already in their congregation, but they have little affect on the population at large.