Shortly
after I posted my last blog, focusing on a couple of the larger “untruths”
coming from the GOP these days, I received an e-mail dismissing my argument by
noting that, “Politicians lie.
That’s what they do.” He
(or she) was right of course. Politicians
do lie; probably always will.
My
concern is not that individual pols will bend the truth when they think it is
to their advantage to do so; my concern is that completely ignoring the truth
or deliberately misrepresenting it seems to have become an integral strategy
for an entire political party. It
isn’t that Mitt Romney or one of his surrogates is occasionally disingenuous;
it’s that the official talking points of the GOP as a whole are so often clear
and deliberate fabrications.
Nowhere
is this more in-your-face than in the broadside of attacks launched against the
Affordable Care Act, or, as Republicans like to phrase it, “Obamacare.” (as an aside, have you noticed how they
always encase the word in quotation marks—you can almost see the air quote
gesture and the accompanying snide look)
Some of these attacks are more egregiously lies than others, but all of
them fly directly in the face of easily checked facts.
Let’s
start with perhaps the most egregious lie, the one that most often is the lead
attack—that the Affordable Care Act is socialist and represents a federal
government takeover of health insurance.
There are, to be sure, a lot of things in the Affordable Care Act that
are complex, expressed in very dense legalese, hard to wrap a layman’s head
around. That the law requires
everyone who doesn’t have health insurance to purchase it from a private
insurance company isn’t one of them.
That is the central tenet of the law, and it is expressed in very clear,
very direct terms. If you don’t
have health insurance but can afford to purchase it—either on your own entirely
or with some assistance from the government—you must do so and the beneficiary
of that transaction must be a private insurance company.
When
you point that out to a Republican, the response is usually a shuffling of the
feet, a quick glance at the floor and a mumble that includes something about
all the regulations insurance companies have to follow in order to sell those
new policies. Well, yes. They have to agree not to cancel your
policy the first time you need to use it; they have to agree not to raise your
premium because you filed a claim; they have to agree to accept you regardless
of pre-existing conditions; they have to agree not to impose a cap on the total
amount you can receive in benefit payments. When you ask a Republican which of those regulations they
would prefer go away, they generally excuse themselves from the conversation
and look for a more hospitable corner of the room.
The
deliciously ironic aspect of this lie is that the GOP gets no support from the
insurance industry when they express it.
The insurance industry is not stupid, nor, in this case at least,
interested in participating in deliberate prevarication. The industry recognizes that, beginning
in 2014, the Affordable Care Act has delivered about 30 million potential new
customers. Far from a government
takeover of the private health insurance industry, the ACA is perhaps its
biggest booster.
The
second most common false assertion from Republicans is that the ACA is a
potentially lethal “job-killer.”
FactCheck.Org, a completely non-partisan project from the Annenberg
Public Policy Center, placed this one very high on its list of “Whoppers of
2011.” Nonetheless, there have
been thus far in 2012 no fewer than 5 national ad campaigns from the Chamber of
Commerce dedicated to labeling ACA as a job-killer. And John Boehner, not
surprisingly, used the phrase 7 times during a 14 minute press conference.
Republicans
base this claim on a Congressional Budget Office (non-partisan) study that said
ACA would likely reduce “the amount of labor being used in the economy by a
small amount—roughly half a percent.”
Republicans didn’t actually base their attack on the CBO report
directly, but instead on the report analyzing it issued by their propaganda
machine, The Heritage Foundation.
According to Heritage, that “half a percent” “equates to about 700,000
additional Americans being unemployed.”
As
usual, the Heritage Foundation cherry-picked the CBO paper in order to draw the
conclusion it wanted. What the CBO
said—in the paragraphs immediately following the one Heritage quoted—is as
follows: “The expansion of Medicaid and the availability of subsidies through
the exchanges will effectively increase beneficiaries’ financial
resources. Those addition
resources will encourage some people to work fewer hours . . .”
In the next paragraph, the CBO
said, “Changes to the insurance market, including provisions that prohibit
insurers from denying coverage to people because of preexisting conditions and
that restrict how much prices can vary with an individual’s age or health
status, will increase the appeal of health insurance plans offered outside the
workplace for older workers. As a
result, some older workers will choose to retire earlier than they otherwise
would.”
What the CBO actually was saying
then is that many young and middle-aged people currently working multiple jobs
or 60 hour weeks in order to afford health care, will, under ACA, be able to
afford to work fewer hours and/or fewer jobs. They will be voluntarily, in other words, “reducing the
amount of labor in the economy.”
The CBO did not say this, but it follows that when people quit a second
job they no longer need, that job then becomes available for someone who
currently has none. The CBO didn’t
go there because, while it’s reasonable to assume that employers will still
need someone to fill the vacated job, there’s no way at this point to put a
hard number on how often that will occur.
The same factor is involved with
the CBO’s second point, that, with affordable health care available outside the
workplace, many older Americans will retire earlier. Again, the job vacated will still need doing, and so
represents another opportunity for an unemployed person to become employed.
What I’m not claiming here is that
ACA will lower unemployment. The act hasn’t taken full effect yet, so it would
be just as preposterous to make that claim as it is for Republicans to declare
with certainty that it will kill jobs.
The most reasonable conclusion that can be drawn with the facts
available now is that there’s no way to say whether the net effect of the bill
on jobs will be positive or negative, but the most likely effect of it will be
neither.
The closest we can come to a
meaningful conclusion about the job-killing power of ACA comes from
Massachusetts, where for all intents and purposes the law has been in effect since
2006. In an article entitled
“Timely Analysis of Immediate Health Policy Issues” prepared in June of 2012,
the authors (Lisa Dubay, Sharon K. Long and Emily Lawton) compared employment
trends in Massachusetts to those in four economically similar states (Delaware,
Wisconsin, Nebraska and Minnesota), and with trends nationally.
They broke the firms being studied
into several categories, the one of most interest here being firms with between
10 and 499 employees. The Chamber
of Commerce defines small businesses as those with fewer than 500 employees (in
my view a rather high number for a small business). The ACA excludes businesses with fewer than 10 employees, so
this would seem the most appropriate category to look at. The figures are revealing.
Between 2006 and 2008—the last good
economic years before the Great Recession—employment in this category of small
businesses was up slightly in Massachusetts and the four comparable states by
0.5%. Employment in the nation as
a whole for the category was flat.
So in the first years of the Massachusetts health care law, employment gains
actually outstripped the rest of the country.
In the years 2008-2010—the worst
part of the Great Recession—in the 50-499 category employment fell 1.9% in
Massachusetts, 1.6% in the four comparable states, and 2.2% in the nation as a
whole. In other words, the only
state with mandatory health insurance, during the worst years of the recession,
suffered less small business employment drop off than did the nation as a
whole.
One other point worth noting on the
job-killer front. Republicans
screaming about the deleterious effect of ACA on small businesses always skip
the part about businesses employing 25 or fewer people. Such businesses that already offer
health care for their employees will, starting in 2014, be eligible for new tax
credits based on the premiums they pay.
And businesses with fewer than 25 employees who opt to start providing
insurance will also get tax credits.
And yet, you cannot listen to a
Republican talk about ACA without hearing the term job-killer in at least every
other sentence.
The last lie we’ll cover here
(there are several more) originated, big surprise here, with Karl Rove’s
Crossroads GPS PAC. In 201l,
Crossroads ran a series of television ads charging that the Obama administration
was granting ACA waivers to unions as a payoff for union support in 2008. The charge was of course picked up
immediately by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and all the usual right-wing bloviation
groups.
What they claimed was that unions
that offered health insurance plans to their members were being allowed to opt
out of the law’s requirement that plans could not cap benefits, either annually
or over the life of the policy, while company’s who offered insurance plans
were not allowed that option.
This one is so patently false that
one has to assume Rove et al knew it was bunk when they made the charge but
decided it would play so well for their base that it was a lie worth telling.
The truth is that ACA calls for a
phasing in of the cap: $750,000 was the minimum in the first year, with the cap
escalating to no cap after full implementation of the plan in 2014. Some companies, mostly those with a
preponderance of low-wage employees, immediately started complaining that the
increase in premium being demanded by insurance companies would force them
either to increase what their employees had to pay or end coverage
altogether. The law of unintended
consequences rearing its ugly head.
Since that was clearly not the goal
of the new law, the Department of Health and Human Services (which administers
this portion of it), began granting waivers—actually partial waivers—to the new
rule. The waivers were granted
until 2014 when ACA fully kicks in—at which point employees would have the
option of buying private insurance themselves (with no cap), and low-wage
workers would be eligible for tax credits to help them with said purchases. The waivers were granted, in other
words, so that low-wage workers who already had some degree of health insurance
wouldn’t lose it prior to ACA’s full implementation.
Union plans were caught in the same
box as employer plans. As of this
writing, HHS has received 1,372 applications for waivers, 1,280 of which have
been approved. Of those, 27 were
union plans, 315 were plans managed jointly by unions and employers, and 938
were company plans. If you count
both union only and joint managed plans as being union plans, they total less
than 25% of the waivers granted.
If, as would seem more appropriate, you look at only the fully union
plans, the figure is less than 2%.
Kind of hard to see favoritism or
some kind of payback in those numbers.
What is disturbing to me is that on
this, as with many other issues, the GOP predilection for dispensing with any
concern for the truth seems integral to their campaign strategy. Lying is essentially a basic component
of their playbook.
Equally concerning is that it can
be a basic component of their playbook because they know they have major media
outlets—Fox, Drudge, Limbaugh, Malkin the most obvious—that will give their
lies extensive air time with no questioning much less editing.
But perhaps most concerning is the
number of people in this country whose only source of information (voluntarily
in most cases) are those right wing media outlets, and for whom the lies are
self-evident truths.
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