White House Releases another Bulls**t Fact Sheet on ObamaCare

As the Supreme Court nears its ruling on the King vs Burwell case, the rhetoric form the left is heating up including some digs by the President himself who, for all intents and purposes, stated that the Supreme Court had no place in taking up the case at all.  As well the president expressed that he thinks it is important that they {the Supreme Court} do what legal scholar “expect” them to do.  Those are pretty bold statements coming from one supposed co-equal branch of government aimed at another.

But this is nothing new or unexpected coming from this administration especially in its ongoing attempts to protection the president’s signature healthcare reform law at any cost, even if it means an attempt to bully the Supreme Court Justices {they are unaffected by the President’s comments I assure you} and misleading the public into believing that ObamaCare has been a shining success.  A perfect example of the later is a White House brief released back in March titled: Key Facts and Reports: TheFifth Anniversary of the Affordable Care Act.  The brief, little more than a list of inaccurate and in some cases a complete fabrication of the facts, was written and released in an effort to bolster a highly misleading perception to the public that ObamaCare is working great. 

Let’s take a look at the “key facts” in the report, working from top to bottom, starting with the following paragraph:

Thanks to the ACA, millions of Americans who already had health insurance now have better coverage because women can no longer be charged higher premiums than men for the same plan, people with pre-existing conditions can no longer be denied coverage, and young adults won’t age off their parent’s policy when they turn age 19 or graduate from college. 

“Women can no longer be charged higher premiums than men” - Boy oh boy the Obama Administration sucked the feminists into this one and used it to the administrations advantage.  It’s a plain and simple fact that the biological complexities that allow women to conceive, grow and bare children requires greater preventative care to ensure their long term health and wellbeing.  As well, due to these same biological differences women have more wellness challenges.  And yet, feminists demand that insurers not be able to charge women more for healthcare coverage than their male counterparts. 

The Obama Administration took advantage of this demand for equality and appeased the feminist by not allowing insurers to take gender into consideration when price rating plans.  But this did not lower rates for women, it instead increased the rates of men.  In the minds of feminists, this created equality but in reality all it did was used their complaint as a means to create a premium surplus which insurers could now use to offset some of the other cost generated by other mandates imposed on them by ObamaCare. 

The feminist receive a false victory, ObamaCare gets a kudos for creating gender equality and the insurers have a much needed revenue stream to offset other mandates imposed upon the by the new ObamaCare law.  The only loser in this arrangement are men who are now paying additional for healthcare benefits they lack the physical ability to use.

“People with pre-existing condition can no longer be denied coverage” - Yup, that’s’ what the law states and in fact insurers can no longer deny anyone coverage.  However, preventing an insurer from denying coverage does not mean that that coverage is affordable and in the case of ObamaCare it turns out that in far too many cases those that once found them being locked out of healthcare insurance now find it unaffordable.  The fact of the matter is, there may be more people with a pre-existing medical condition that are uninsured now than there was prior to ObamaCare being passed in to law.

“Young adults won’t age off of their parent’s policy” - This is a solution to a problem that was created by the ObamaCare law itself as well as the failure of the Obama Administration to create jobs during the presidents first term. 

Before ObamaCare, full time student were able to say on their parents insurance plans.  The cut off age then, in most cases, was 24 as it was assumed that by this age the student had completed his or her collage studies and would secure a job and thus become responsible for his or own insurance needs.  For those young adults that did not take the college avenue or those whose employers did not offer insurance, very affordable catastrophic healthcare plans, well suited for healthy young adults, were available.  ObamaCare made these catastrophic plans obsolete thus making healthcare insurance unaffordable to those who had them.  Additionally, the Obama Administration quickly recognized the fact that jobs were not being recovered fast enough thus increasing the number of young adults finishing college and unable to find work and therefor going uninsured.

And so, a provision in the ObamaCare law was created that allowed young adults, regardless of student status or living status to remain on their parents insurance.  This provision was nothing more than a Band-Aid used to stop the bleeding created by the ObamaCare law and bad economic recovery policy.

 

On to the next paragraph which reads:

Despite this progress, Republicans in Congress continue to fight for special interests, not middle class families. They have voted more than 50 times to repeal the ACA, which would eliminate tough rules, including those that guarantee health coverage even if you have a pre-existing condition.

“Republicans in Congress continue to fight for special interests, not middle class families” – I wonder who/what these “special interests” that Obama often speaks about are?  This is where Obama loses credibility with so many on the right.  It is unpresidential to simply fabricate an argument out of thin air and then pass it on as fact.  As well, I am certain that the increased cost of healthcare insurance has had significantly more negative impact on the middle class than they have positive.  The uninsured middle class are the ones who have found the healthcare plans offered on the ObamaCare exchanges to be unattractive and unaffordable as can be measured by their incredibly low enrollment despite the federal mandate to do so.

“Voted more than 50 times to repeal the ACA” - This is one of the most disingenuous statements that is constantly repeated by the Obama Administration.  There have been only a half dozen or so “full repeal” votes take for ObamaCare and each one of them was taken as a matter of record and process. 

When Republicans won back the house they had to put their position to repeal ObamaCare on record.  They knew they didn’t have the votes to repeal the law, that was not the purpose of the vote.  And at budget time, as a matter of process, Republicans voted for a full repeal, again knowing they did not have the needed support of Democrats but it was a vote that must be made for the record as part of the budget process.  And again, when Republicans won back the Senate, another procedural vote for the record.  There have also been numerous votes to repeal or fix parts of the law, nearly a dozen of which were passed with bipartisan support and signed by the president but they’ll be no mention of that as it does not suit the narrative.

Moving on to where the brief touches on how the Affordable Care Act is Working!

The first bullet point labeled “Improving Coverage” states that after five years, more than 16 million Americans have gained health coverage.  Sadly, and is always the case, the White House fails to qualify that figure nor do they ever compare where we are today to where they expected to be.

First let’s clear the air on the “more than 16 million” figure.  This is not a hard number, this is from a study conducted by the Rand Corporation which did their magic and ascertained that some 22 million more Americans are now insured however, over 5 million lost their healthcare insurance.  Rand’s number is closer to 17 million.  Now, if we pull out the over 12 million who have taken advantage of the FREE Medicaid expansion, as reported by HHS, we are down to less than 5 million formerly uninsured individuals who purchased and paid for a qualified healthcare plan either through one of the ObamaCare exchanges or on the private marketplace. 

This is where information gets sketchy but only because the Obama Administration refuses to release hard enrollment numbers.  Instead, they have passed the buck and keep feeding us with these independent studies.  Worst yet, which study they site at any given moment depends largely in which study puts ObamaCare enrollment in the best light.  From the top four most respected industry experts, the number of formerly uninsured that have gained coverage through the ObamaCare exchanges range between 2 million and 4 million, depending on which report you choose to believe.  But a much more reliable source to this figure has been provided by Charles Gaba.  Gaba has become the most respected ObamaCare enrollment information gatherer and number cruncher, having received both recognition and the endorsement of HHS.  In Gaba’s own work he finds that only about 2 million individuals total have signed up for a qualified healthcare plan through the ObamaCare exchanges at the completion of the second open enrollment period.

So while the 16 million figure that the administration throws out looks pretty impressive, when you consider that 12 million of those are FREE Medicaid expansion recipients and somewhere around 2 million have purchased a healthcare plan through the exchanges {10 million were projected to have done so by 2015} then things really don’t look too hot for ObamaCare.  

As for the 4 million balance, first we must acknowledge that the number could be considerably lower if a less favorable study were adopted.  Second, while we do not know the number, we do know that healthcare plans were purchased off exchange, directly from private insurance providers.  And last, over 4 million new jobs have been created since the rollout of the ObamaCare exchanges some percentage of which provide their employees with healthcare insurance.

What this all means as, putting aside giving away FREE Medicaid, ObamaCare has done a pretty horrible job in increasing insurance coverage for the uninsured.


The next bullet reads:  Improving Affordability and states that since ObamaCare was enacted, health care prices have risen at the slowest rate in nearly 50 years. 

What is not stated in this bullet is that the slowdown in healthcare prices began in 2009, prior to ObamaCare bill being written, much less the law being enacted.  This has been one of the most repeated falsehoods perpetuated by the Obama Administration of all.  Other than those on the White House payroll, economist and industry experts both agree that the slowdown in healthcare prices is due to the recession and they expect that the rate of increase will return to pre-recession levels once the economy reaches a full recovery.


The final bullet reads: Improving Quality and goes on to suggest that improvements in quality of care, promoted buy ObamaCare, contributed to 50,000 fewer deaths. 

The source of this claim is a study that looks at the reduction in the hospital death rate over a period of time however, the study makes no claim nor correlation to the cause of the reduction and certainly does not link the cause to ObamaCare in any way.  That is not to say that ObamaCare did not play some part in the reduction in the hospital death rate, as various programs were implemented just prior to the noted death rate reductions however, as previously stated, there is no direct correlation that can be made nor are any other mitigating factors considered.

But let’s assume for a moment that certain provisions of the ObamaCare law did in fact have a hand in preventing 50,000 hospital deaths.  Like the Medicaid expansion, which would be in jeopardy if the law were to be overturned, so could the provisions that prevent these deaths.  This is the danger of a comprehensive law, especially one that is overwhelmingly unpopular, purely partisan and failing to even come close to meeting its primary objective of placing a qualified healthcare plan in the hands of some 24 million uninsured American’s by 2017 {they are at fewer than 3 million currently}.

So there you have it, seven out of eight ObamaCare facts, boasted as a success by the administration, turn out to be at very best highly misleading and a couple a complete fabrication of the truth.  How the president and his administration can continue to tell these tall tales to the American people with a straight face is beyond comprehension.  And they do so for the purpose of protecting the president’s only agenda item with a check mark next to it as well as to protect the image of the Democratic Party which has been all in with ObamaCare from the get go.  

It’s a shameful act that speaks volumes of what the Democratic Party has become under this president.