Sorry, Mr. Speaker, Obamacare didn't result in a net loss of coverage.
"Obamacare: Where's The Train Wreck?"
"Obamacare: Where's The Train Wreck?"
"The Hard, Central Truth Of Contemporary Conservatism"
2009 Harvard Study: 45,000 Americans Die Annually For Lack of Health Insurance
Republican Ruled States That Refuse To Expand Medicaid Are Despicable
GOP's Anti Medicaid Expansion Body Count, By State
GOP Hopping On Medicaid Expansion Bandwagon
"Don't Buy The Hype. American Insurance Companies Think Obamacare Is Going To Be Fine"
Canadian Healthcare: Not Perfect, Just Better. Lots Better
Canadian Healthcare Better Than U.S.
Bloomberg News Service
Earlier this month I wrote about the intellectually bankrupt absurdity of the recently argued King v. Burwell case, which risks depriving 8 million people of health insurance and death-spiraling the individual insurance markets in 37 states. I received an email from a reader chastising me for defending Obamacare. Wasn’t I aware, the reader inveighed, that the Affordable Care Act is unaffordable? Did I not know that the law has robbed millions of their health care and even more of their jobs?
On one level the note was nonsensical, a propaganda scrum focused on Obamacare, which will achieve its fifth anniversary this month. But especially in the context of both King v. Burwell and 2016, it highlights a trap for the GOP.
Start with the facts. Just last week the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the law will cost 29 percent – that’s more than $200 billion – less than originally forecast when it was enacted five years ago. And as Vox’s Sarah Kliff and Ezra Klein report, the government is on track to spend $600 billion less on health care in this decade than was first projected in 2010, pre-Obamacare. Put another way, the government is spending less now even with the new outlays in the law than it anticipated spending before. This should not be hugely surprising given that the CBO originally scored the law as a deficit-reducer, but along with the dropping price tag it’s a striking reminder.
On the topic of whether the law has cost people their health insurance, the talking point is also at variance with the facts. Last year, for example, the Washington Post’s fact checker awarded House Speaker John Boehner “Four Pinocchios” for asserting that Obamacare had caused a net loss of insurance. Weeks later FactCheck.org wrote that the claim that “millions” of people have lost insurance because of Obamacare is “misleading. Those individual market plans were discontinued, but policyholders weren’t denied coverage.” Most lost old policies but got new ones.
And more to the point, the overall uninsured figure has dropped sharply. A January Gallup survey found that the uninsured rate dropped to 12.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2014, down from 17.1 percent a year earlier. These results were in keeping with other independent findings on this topic. Around the same time, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data showed that the number of uninsured Americans fell by 6.8 million in the first half of the year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Just this week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that16.4 million people have gained insurance under Obamacare in the five years since it was enacted; that's a 35 percent decline in the uninsured rate.
What about the jobs? “It’s going to destroy our economy,” then-Rep. Paul Broun, a Republican of Georgia, said in October, 2013. That’s pretty tough stuff. And it’s wrong. When President Barack Obama signed Obamacare into law, the unemployment rate stood at 9.7 percent. It’s now 5.5 percent. As ThinkProgress has noted, February’s addition of 295,000 jobs marked the 12th straight month with more than 200,000 added – the longest streak of that kind since 1977. And PwC’s 2015 survey of CEOs found that for the first time in five years, “more business leaders rate the U.S. as their most important market for overseas growth ahead of all others, including China’s.” I’ll sign up for that level of destruction any day.
But as is so often the case in politics, inconvenient data does little to change rhetoric. Last year’s gloomdoggling predictions aren’t slain by facts, they merely morph into well-worn right-wing urban legend. So as recently as last week, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch could blandly assert to The New York Times that “Obamacare is going to bankrupt the country.” (“Once people get hooked on it, the only answer is to move this country to socialism,” he added.) Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush last week declared Obamacare to be a “monstrosity” that was “the greatest job suppressor in the so-called recovery.” And so on.
Given the GOP’s unbending attitude toward the law, it seems safe to say that 2016 GOPers will fall over themselves to match Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s insistence that “every last word of Obamacare must be repealed.” Like 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, the eventual nominee will probably invoke the idea of day one executive orders to pave the way. That in and of itself could prove problematic if Democrats can ever figure out how to marshal the facts enough to even up Obamacare’s upside-down poll numbers.
But King v. Burwell could pose an especially pointed problem. Recall the 8 million people who stand to lose their insurance if the high court declares that the IRS’s allowing subsidies for federally-run exchanges violates the law. Chief Justice John Roberts was uncharacteristically quiet during the King arguments. The one question he did ask was whether a future administration’s IRS could reverse the current view of the law. Noting that Roberts is a longtime advocate of an expansive executive and so might be loath to restrict it in this case (by overruling the IRS), The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin wrote, “The question suggests a route out of the case for Roberts—and the potential for a victory for the Obama administration.”
If Roberts couples another Obamacare victory with a reminder that a GOP president holds the power to reinterpret the law, he would also be setting a trap for Republicans who vow to use any means available to eradicate the act. Even if Republicans don’t say it explicitly, any Democratic ad-maker worth their salt will note that this would start with reinterpreting the subsidies issue – so costing 8 million Americans their health coverage.
If the next president is a Republican he or she will face a test of reality versus rhetoric, and the question will be the extent they bend to the facts.
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