Health-care lies proliferate

By Tom Maertens
The Mankato Free Press
Sat Jan 15, 2011, 11:24 PM CST

PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning independent fact-checking website, chose “Government Takeover of Health Care” as the 2010 Lie of the Year.

In reality, as Politfact noted, under the Affordable Care Act employers will continue to rely on the free market to provide health insurance to workers through private companies. The government will not nationalize health care or hospitals, nor is there a government-run insurance plan that would compete with private insurers.

There is a pattern with right-wing lies about health care though: Sarah Palin’s “death panel” story was voted Politfact’s biggest lie of 2009.

FactCheck.org, the other leading fact-checking project, from the University of Pennsylvania, shredded another Republican fabrication about health care reform, the latest one about the “budget-busting, job-killing” program.

According to FactCheck, those claims badly misrepresent what the CBO concluded about the law, pointing out that Republicans’ job-loss claims were based on a hypothetical employer mandate that doesn’t exist. They made it up.

As for budget-busting, the Congressional Budget Office officially scored the new law as self-financing, saying it would actually reduce the deficit over the first 10 years by a total of $230 billion and by a trillion dollars in the second decade.

If the law is repealed, 32 million fewer people will have health insurance in 2019, resulting in a total of 54 million uninsured Americans by then. But when have Republicans ever done anything to benefit average Americans? Do they even know that 44 million Americans were living in poverty in 2009, a jump of 4 million from 2008?

The new law guarantees that people with pre-existing conditions cannot be denied coverage. The Republicans want to repeal that.

The law requires insurance companies to cover adult children up to age 26 on their parents’ policy. The Republicans want to repeal that.

The law provides for free annual wellness exams for Medicare enrollees. The Republicans want to repeal that.

Insurers can no longer cancel coverage when people get sick. Republicans want to repeal that.

The law limits insurance company premium hikes and requires insurance companies to spend at least 80 percent of premiums on health care rather than on CEO perks. The Republicans want to repeal that.

The law allows Medicare enrollees to get many preventive health services, such as vaccinations and cancer screening for free. Republicans want to repeal that.

The law begins to close the “doughnut hole” for prescription drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries in 2011, a benefit The National Council on Aging estimates could save some people up to $1,800. Republicans want to repeal that.

Cost savings, such as reducing the corporate subsidies under Medicare Advantage, along with anti-fraud provisions and other requirements will keep Medicare financially solvent. Republicans want to repeal that.

Tax credits and other cost-sharing devices will be phased in to make health coverage more affordable for as many as 28.6 million low- and moderate-income workers who will be able to buy through insurance exchanges where private insurers will compete to provide coverage. Republicans want to repeal that.

Polls have shown that only 15 percent of Americans know that that CBO believes the bill will reduce the deficit. If this were widely understood the bill would become more popular, which is part of the reason Republicans continue to spread lies about the health care bill.

Their calculated distortion of the facts brings to mind Jacques LeGoff’s (Medieval Civilization) comment in another context: “They chose to grow stupid in order to conquer.” Republicans took over the House with a massive disinformation campaign; why change tactics now?

As was apparent to anyone watching during the last election, the Republican Party has completely sold out to big money and corporate lobbyists, including the health insurance industry, which contributed three times as much money to Republicans as to Democrats last year.

Now the bought-off congressmen will use the legislative process to provide handouts to their campaign contributors, as Republicans did for Big Pharma with the sweetheart anti-competitive Prescription Drug bill that costs taxpayers billions every year.

Their poster-boy is John Boehner, a corporate shill who went on 180 junkets in six years (most of them golf trips), flew on corporate jets 45 times between 2000 and 2007, took at least 41 other corporate-sponsored trips in the past decade, and collected $44 million in “campaign funds” from favored industries, according to several sources, but most recently by an article by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone magazine.

Boehner and the Republicans want you to think their opposition to health care is a blow for Adam Smith and the free market, but it is really paying off the people who pay them off.

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