News Media Report Card on ObamaCare Tells Misleading Tale

Yesterday marked the 5 Year Anniversary of ObamaCare.  So how about we take a look at what the news media is saying about ObamaCare, 5 years after, and grade them on the job they are doing in providing truth and facts to the American people.  After all, that is what journalism is all about isn’t it, providing the truth and the facts?

We could pick any number of far left leaning so called “journalistic” sources to perform this exercise on but that would make this effort no better than the uber bias they most certainly inject into their piece.  Instead, we’ll use a story from Tribune News Service written by Tony Pugh that we found published on MSN news on Sunday titled:  Taking the pulse of Obama's health care lawat age 5

The opening paragraph sets the tone for what is a fairly long list of misinformation, but nothing we really have not heard before.

With more than 50 congressional repeal votes, a near-death Supreme Court experience and a botched marketplace debut to its credit, the Affordable Care Act has had a tortured five-year existence as the Republican Party's legislative enemy No. 1.

No, there have not been 50 congressional repeal votes for ObamaCare, nor has there been 40 or 30 or 20 or even 10.  Declaring that Republicans keep feudally attempting to repeal ObamaCare is a favorite of ObamaCare proponents that for some reason think congressional republicans are so stupid as to constantly call to vote on something they know they don’t have the votes for.  A full repeal vote for ObamaCare has been call only 7 maybe 8 times and each time as a part of process or record.  When the law was first passed of course there was an immediate repeal vote, republican lawmakers needed to be sure their unanimous position was on official congressional record.  The same holds true when republicans won back the House and again when they won back the Senate, those full repeal votes again are to put their position on record.  And each year, as part of the budget process, a full repeal vote is taken again, this is part of process.  

As for the rest of the ObamaCare repeal votes that liberal democrats keep rambling on about and the media keeps reporting, they simply do not exist.  There are a large number of votes on various pieces of ObamaCare that have received a repeal vote, several initiated by Democrats and many which have passed on a bi-partisan vote, but we would not want to confuse things with a few simple facts. 

The bottom line is that the vast majority of these so called 50 plus repeal votes, that are constantly being reported, are generated by yammering liberal democrats trying to mislead everyone into thinking that congressional republicans are really that stupid.  Sadly the media has chosen to parrot this tall tale told by democrats but then, why shouldn’t they be, their president repeats the same misleading facts!

But we are not going to let the media off the hook on this one just because the president is just as guilty of perpetuating an untruth that can be disproven in a 2 minute internet search.  Because of this we are going to grade this media claim a big fat “F”!


Scrolling down the article a bit, we run across this paragraph:

The nation's uninsured rate has plummeted as more Americans enroll in Medicaid or in federal and state marketplace coverage.

Another liberal and media favorite, misguided and you could even go as far as saying untruthful.   Yes, the number of uninsured in the nation has dropped significantly, almost all due to the Medicaid expansion.   The federal and stated marketplace {the ObamaCare exchanges} have performed miserably through both the 1st and 2nd open enrollment periods, failing to have enrolled even one third the number of uninsured they were intended, a critical measure of the success of ObamaCare that is repeatedly ignored and left out of the conversation. 

Why the media does not address Medicaid and the marketplace established by ObamaCare as two separate issues defies truthful reporting however, as we have learned, liberals seem to believe that any reduction in the number of the nations uninsured is a measure of success for the law regardless of any fiscal or economic ramifications much less the fact that the current trend indicates that the law will leave an additional 10 million without healthcare insurance above the 30 million that was already projected.

Only because of the liberal belief that enrollment in the ObamaCare exchanges is not a factor in measuring the success of ObamaCare do we grade this media claim a grade of “D” otherwise the author failing to differentiate enrollment between the two very different marketplaces would have earned this claim a grade of “F”.


The very next paragraph points out another long time misguided belief, perpetuated by the Obama Administration and bought, hook line and sinker, by those who wish to believe in all the great good the law is said to be doing.

The law's consumer protections and insurance-benefit requirements have improved the quality of coverage for millions of people who get health insurance outside the workplace.

This paragraph calls to the success of two very different aspects of ObamaCare, both equally as troubling once you find your way past the self-serving praise the administration gives itself for a job not so well done. 

First, consumer protections!  There are a number of consumer protections claimed by the administration to be a part of ObamaCare but the one of the most specific and most talked about is laws mandate which prohibits insurers from denying healthcare insurance to an individual due to a pre-existing condition.  The biggest fallacy about this particular protection is not of the protection itself but the grand embellishment to the American people as to its need, when trying to sell the law to us.  In an attempt to play on the people’s heart strings, the Obama Administration set out to convince We the People that millions upon millions of individuals in this country were suffering after being denied healthcare insurance due to a pre-existing medical condition.  This might be the grandest of all the misleading information that the president has posed upon the people.

Those crafting the ObamaCare law determined that the number of individuals suffering from a cost prohibitive pre-existing condition were fewer than 400,000, a far cry from the millions the administration led us all to believe would be helped by ObamaCare.  As it turns out, only about one third of those fewer than 400,000 projected found ObamaCare attractive and affordable.

One of the other consumer protections that I find particularly amusing is the claim that ObamaCare ends insurer discrimination against women.

Without argument, the healthcare needs of the average woman are greater and more costly than the healthcare needs of the average man and therefore the private healthcare insurance marketplace has historically priced their individual plans accordingly.  But this for decades has had liberal women’s groups up in arms, claiming discrimination and demanding equality.  And in ObamaCare, these people who have been waving the discrimination flag and fighting for their interpretation of equality have receive what they have been wishing for, at least that is what they see in their own blind ignorance.

The president made it part of his ObamaCare campaign to claim his grand healthcare reform would bring equality between men and women and it did.  By mandating that insurance rates could not be gender based, what the administration was able to do, through the laws “essential healthcare benefits” package, was to generate much needed revenue to cover other high cost issues by forcing men to pay for the same healthcare needs as women.  In doing so, those liberal ladies who screamed that they were being discriminated against gained their interpretation of equality.  Their rates did not go down but instead men’s rates went up as they now had to pay for healthcare benefits that they are physically incapable of utilizing.  In the minds of liberals, this brought fairness to the table and for insurers it was a fiscal windfall as it brought a new and guaranteed revenue stream to them.

This claim too also earns the grade of a “D”.  Other than the consumer protection that mandates those with a pre-existing condition cannot be denied healthcare insurance, there are no other consumer protections that have provided consumers any measurable protection while the essential benefits the administration speaks of had done a wonderful job in generating revenue to be shifted to other needing provisions of the law.  Why wasn’t this reported on?


The next paragraph in the article is simply laughable:

Premiums for marketplace health insurance have largely been reasonable and have increased only moderately thus far. Long-term cost estimates for providing coverage under the law have been falling.

I’m not even sure where to start with this three line bit of mumbo jumbo.  I guess on the positive side the author chose to use the word “moderately” instead of something you might see from a more left leaning piece that would state “slightly” but any statement that claims insurance premiums under ObamaCare are anything that remotely resembles reasonable is mind boggling.

Those that have participated on the individual marketplace since before ObamaCare was passed into law have been hit with one rate increase after another beginning soon after the law was passed.  Insures forced to comply with several costly mandates began raising rates just months after the law was passed.  And as insurers become more familiar with the impact the law might have on them in the future, rates on individual plans continued to rise.  Few got away with increases of less than 30% over the period the law was passed and the opening of the ObamaCare exchanges in October of 2013 while others saw their premiums go up as much as 100% as in the case of many Californian’s who were insured by Anthem Blue Cross of California.

And then, to add insult to injury, the majority of those who had been chasing their rate increases over the previous three years were hit again when the ObamaCare exchanges opened.  Few states realized rate increases less than 20% while most saw increases from around 30% on up.  Even with the new taxpayer funded subsidies the administration boasted so much about, most people on the individual marketplace were now paying significantly higher premiums than they would have had the law never passed.  Many were chased right out of having healthcare insurance while a larger percentage required the assistance of the subsidies to maintain the same healthcare coverage that they were once able to afford without assistance.

And for the 30 million or so uninsured that did not qualify for Medicaid, they seem to be disenchanted with the cost of healthcare insurance through the exchanges as well as, even under federal mandate and the threat of penalty, they are simply not signing up for healthcare insurance.

For the 2015 insurance year, rates on the ObamaCare exchanges rose moderately, avoiding skyrocketing increases only because of the risk-corridor provision and pleading by the administration to hold premiums down.  Insurers are guaranteed to be reimbursed for certain losses, those that they did not feel they would be paid back for they passed to plan deductibles.  And the bad news is already out for 2016.  In a recent CBO report it is projected that premiums will increase 8.5% for the coming three years.  This will no doubt drive more people out of the insurance pool than it will attract.

For this claim, we grade the media with a big fat “F”, they did not do any homework what so ever.


And the next paragraph in the article is as laughable is the previous as it provides a complete misinterpretation of the facts:

Early Congressional Budget Office projections showed the law would trim the federal budget deficit by $124 billion from 2010 to 2019, while its repeal would increase the deficit by more than $100 billion from 2013 to 2022. The CBO can't update the law's projected impact on the deficit because of forecasting difficulties.

This statement is made as a result of the findings of a CBO report requested by democrats to score the effects of HR 6079, an ObamaCare repeal bill put forth by House Republicans at the time Romney and Obama were fighting for the presidency in 2012.  The language of the bill reads, and I quote:

"Specifically, we estimate that H.R. 6079 would reduce direct spending by $890 billion and reduce revenues by $1 trillion between 2013 and 2022, thus adding $109 billion to federal budget deficits over that period," the CBO and Joint Committee on Taxation said.

It’s a pretty backwards argument to say that repealing a law will reduce spending by $890 billion but because the repeal of the same law that does away with the $1 trillion in revenue it generates its repeal will create a $109 billion deficit {the 1 billion difference is rounding error}.  What this CBO report really reveals, and it was no secrete before this anyway, is that ObamaCare reduces the deficit by generating new revenue, not by reducing federal spending, thus back then making ObamaCare a revenue bill not a reform bill.

But how can this be, didn’t the Supreme Court already rule that ObamaCare was not a revenue bill as if it were it was passed unconstitutionally, or so was the argument?  Revenue bills must originate in the House however, because Democrats lost the final vote they needed to pass the reconciled House/Senate ObamaCare bill, at the suggestion of Nancy Pelosi, the previously passed Senate bill was adopted by the House in its entirety and without change, voted upon and passed. 

Did the Supreme Court get this one wrong and ObamaCare truly is unconstitutional?  It would seem so if Democrats wish to claim that the repeal of the law would create an increase to the deficit as a result of the last revenue generated by ObamaCare.


The next paragraph is more misleading than untrue but misleading has been the means to which this law was passed and continues to survive:

"Most of the dire predictions made by the critics of the ACA have not come to pass," said Drew Altman, president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

While it is true that the direst prediction of the law imploding upon itself, made by some of the more extreme ObamaCare opponents, has not come true we must not forget that both the individual mandate and the employer mandate, the two most significant provisions in the law were both delayed.  Had it not been for these delays that law may very well have imploded but more detrimental to the law public popularity of the law would have plummeted when they realized that the uninsured were not showing up to the exchanges {the vast majority of enrollments in 2014 and 2014 were already insured} as well as the devastating effects it was going to have on the employers.

Now, with the thought of over 10 million Medicaid expansion recipients losing healthcare, the center and left of center public are far less likely to even pay attention to the effects either mandate is having on the nation.  Well played Obama, well played, it’s just too bad it was the American people that you played.


The next several paragraphs are benign in nature or refer to the Medicaid expansion, all pretty much on point.  And then there is this:

Over the next decade, the CBO expects the health law to further reduce the number of uninsured Americans by "24 million to 25 million in most years relative to what would have occurred under prior law."

Factually there is nothing wrong with this paragraph, it states what is projected by the latest CBO report however, in the spirit of fair and impartial reporting it would have been nice if the report provided a little perspective as to what this CBO projection refers to and how things are going so far with this projected reduction of the uninsured.

This often stated CBO projected refers to the reduction in the uninsured through the ObamaCare exchanges and does not include the 15-17 million expected to take advantage of the Medicaid expansion.  This very important tidbit of information is rarely if ever included in these reports and creates confusion to the reader who is likely not familiar with what is included in these CBO reports.  Whether or not the reporter leaves this information out due to his or her own apathy or does so intentionally in an effort to mislead the reader we do not know but it is an error regularly repeated. 

And if in fact the author does understand that this CBO projection refers to enrollment through the ObamaCare exchanges, providing some insight as to the current state of enrollment would be quite helpful to the reader.  Currently, enrollment of the uninsured, through the exchanges, totals someplace between 2 and 3 million.  This reflects a 7 million or greater shortfall in enrollment at this point in the game.

We will give this claim a grade of “D” on the assumption that the media found the interpretation of the CBOs findings simply too complicated to understand.


The final two paragraphs of this article put a cap on everything:

As the health care law hits age 5, it's way too early to pass judgment on its effectiveness, said health care blogger Robert Laszewski. The law's main provisions have been in place for only about 18 months, Laszewski said. Marketplace insurers are still being subsidized by the federal government, and only about half of the estimated 22 million marketplace plan members the CBO envisions in coming years have purchased coverage.

"I would rate Obamacare, 18 months after implementation, as incomplete," Laszewski said. "Anybody who wants to look at Obamacare and talk about whether it's a success or a failure, call me in 2017."

First, it cannot go without mentioning the author’s portrayal of Robert Laszewski as merely a “health care blogger”.  I have to assume that Tony Pugh, the well published author of this and many other healthcare industry related pieces, is fully aware of the credential of Mr. Laszewski.  Purposely playing down Mr. Laszewski’s credentials is doing both himself and Mr. Laszewski an injustice as well as is highly misleading to a reader who may not be aware of Mr. Laszewski’s very long list of credentials.

Moving on to the final paragraph, it would have been nice if the author expanded on that Mr. Laszewski was referring to when he was quoted as saying “call me in 2017”.  In the previous paragraph Mr. Laszewski stated that Marketplace insurers are still being subsidized by the federal government.  Laszewski was referring to the risk-corridors provision which insurers are currently taking advantage of, at the request of the Obama Administration, in an effort to hold down 2015 premiums.  They will do the same, to some extent, for 2016 but the risk-corridor provision ends on December 31, 2016 at which point insurers will no longer be protected from losses and will either raise their rates significantly or abandon the exchanges all-together.  Of course an enrollment miracle could change that but I don’t think anyone believes that is going to happen.

We’ll grade these final two paragraphs a “C” as were not false or misleading however the author could have done a much better job at explaining things.