COVID-19 & Healthcare

Fact Check: AFP’s ‘Pants on Fire’ ad about ‘ObamaCare’

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Liar-LiarThe "Kochtopus" organization Americans For Prosperity is running ads in Southern Arizona against Rep. Ron Barber that begins with some innocuous blonde speaking in a concerned voice about how Americans don't like political ads (it is a political ad!) and saying "health care isn't about politics, it's about people." Ahhh, isn't that special.

Remember, this is from the "Kochtopus" organization Americans For Prosperity — far-right radical politics is all they do, and the "Kochtopus" doesn't give a damn about you or your health care.

In fact, AFP wants to repeal "ObamaCare" which would kick millions of Americans off of health insurance that they did not have before "ObamaCare," and millions of seniors would lose new benefits they received under Medicare. Millions more working poor would be kicked off expanded Medicaid in states like Arizona without the federal funds.

The ad makes three specific claims:

>> "Millions of people have lost their health insurance": This is objectively FALSE. The ad is conflating the recent cancellation notices for substandard insurance policies with "losing insurance," but these policy holders are being offered other plans, or can purchase a plan from the Marketplace health insurance exchange. The key provision of "ObamaCare" is that individuals cannot be denied insurance because of pre-existing conditions, or hitting an annual cap or lifetime cap on benefits.

Abortion politics in the U.S. Supreme Court

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

A couple of weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed as “improvidently granted” the case of Cline  v. Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice (docket 12-1094), an appeal from the state of Oklahoma to  revive a law that restricts doctors’ use of drugs rather than surgery to perform an abortion with the medication RU-486 and others, struck down by the federal courts.

Uterus-stateAround the same time, Planned Parenthood of Texas applied for an order setting aside the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals order permitting the Texas law requiring abortion practitioners to have admitting privilieges at a nearby hospital before they may perform abortions at a clinic or in a doctor’s office. Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas Surgical Health Services v. Abbott (13A452).

In a 5-4 decision along ideological lines, the Court declined on Tuesday to set aside the Fifth Circuit Court order. Lyle Denniston at Scotusblog.com reports, Texas abortion law left in effect:

Splitting five to four, the Supreme Court late Tuesday afternoon refused to block a Texas abortion law that critics say is forcing the closing of one-third of all clinics in the state.  The Court had been studying the issue for the past week.  The majority said that the challengers had not met the requirement for setting aside a federal appeals court’s order permitting the law to take effect on October 31.

The majority specifically included Justices Antonin Scalia, who wrote separately in a concurring opinion joined by Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr., and Clarence Thomas.  But Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy presumably voted with those three, because it would have taken five votes to act definitively on the plea by doctors and clinics when there were four Justices who wanted to block the law.

The specific order denying the application (13A452) was unsigned.  Both Justice Scalia’s opinion and that of the dissenters referred to the result as the action of “the Court.”

(Update) Hey, hysterical media villagers! ‘ObamaCare’ is working where the GOP is not sabotaging it

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

ChickenLittleIn all the media hysteria over the rollout of "ObamaCare," the feckless media villagers always leave out three predicate facts: Chief Justice John Roberts created the Medicaid opt-out with his poorly considered legal opinion upholding the constitutionality of "ObamaCare," opening the door to partisan mischief; second, said partisan mischief did occur with Red State Tea-Publicans refusing to expand Medicaid and denying more than 5 million desperate Americans access to health care; and third, Red State Tea-Publicans refused to set up their own state-run Marketplace insurance exchanges, creating the need for a complex federal system not contemplated. GOP sabotage should be included in every report.

As for all the unhinged media hysteria, Paul Begala at CNN writes Chill: Obamacare snafus are fixable:

[D]espite the bed-wetting from Beltway Chicken Littles, the President's problems are eminently fixable. The Affordable Care Act isn't collapsing. The Obama presidency isn't imploding.

Similarly, Ed Kilgore at the Democratic Strategist looks at the polling that media villagers are so enamored with, and writes in Polling Panic:

What does it all mean? Probably that most people aren't breathlessly following events in Washington other than to register their heat and noise.

Democrats didn't win the 2014 elections in October and they aren't losing them in November. It's time to chill a bit.

So chill out, media villagers. The sky is not falling despite your best efforts to recklessly and irresponsibly panic the public.

Hey, hysterical media villagers! These governors say ‘ObamaCare’ is working

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Remember when the gatekeepers of the corporate media admitted their complicity in the Whitewater conservative scandal mongering of the 1990s, and promised that it wouldn't happen again? Yeah . . .

This was followed by their complicity in selling an illegal and unnecessary war in Iraq and fabricating justifications for war crimes: illegal torture, indefinite detention, and rendition of prisoners to black site prisons; and the wholesale undermining of American's constitutional right to privacy with pervasive electronic eavesdropping, "sneak peak" national security letters without a warrant, etc. War crimes are a "big f#%king deal," as Joe Biden would say. But IOKIYAR.

With the election of President Barack Obama, It's Whitewater all over again:

The “scandals” confronting President Obama are derived almost entirely from the political and media mindset that gave us Whitewater.

That is to say, they are minor instances of bureaucratic incompetence and/or executive overreach that are seized upon by hysterical right-wing media and politicians and eventually aggrandized by their craven mainstream brethren into red-alert-Chryon, full-scale Media Narratives.

The engine of belief that drives these stories is that, with enough rooting around by reporters and congressional panels and special prosecutors, the president eventually will be implicated in some kind of Major Impropriety.

This is what allows otherwise self-respecting journalists to flog stories that are, by all rational standards, partisan boondoggles.

This is the beauty of the scandal mentality: It’s inherently speculative. And it is thus nourished not by an accretion of increasingly damning facts, as in Watergate, but by a daisy chain of lurid conjecture and tangential inquisitions. To quote [bob Woodward], “You’ve got to investigate all these things.”

To put it plainly, Watergate was a foxhunt; Whitewater was a fishing trip.

The latest scandal mongering fishing trip by the corporate media has been the "ObamaCare" rollout. Echoing GOPropaganda talking points, the media villagers have been hysterically reporting any minor instances of bureaucratic incompetence as if it is the biggest disaster of all time! Just last week, the New York Times (of Judy Miller fame — Iraq war, Plamegate) made the ridiculous comparison that the "ObamaCare" rollout is just like the failure of the Bush administration to respond to people suffering and dying as New Orleans drowned after Katrina (with helpful quotes from Bushies making this unjustified comparison). "One of these things is not like the other."

George Will and his mini-me, Robert Robb

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The one political pundit who pisses me off more than any other, mostly because he is treated as credible and "intelligent" by other media villagers, is the patrician prevaricator for the plutocracy, George Will. Just because Will uses the entire dictionary in his columns does not make him "intelligent." If you actually follow the substance of what he says, he is a conservative ideological extremist. Just because he is not a bomb thrower like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity does not make him any more credible.

Arizona has its own version of the patrician prevaricator for the plutocracy, a George Will mini-me if you will, Robert Robb of the Arizona Republic. This conservative ideological extremist sets me off in the same way that George Will does.

Here is the latest example of how mini-me at the Republic lives in the shadow his role model, George Will.

The patrician prevaricator for the plutocracy was on FAUX News Sunday, and "suggested that President Barack Obama had caused a "constitutional scandal" by giving states the option of letting insurance companies continue to sell junk insurance plans for one year. George Will: Obamacare 'Fix' Lets Next GOP President Stop Taxing Rich Without Congress:

"It looks to a great many of us [GOPropagandists] to be illegal," he added, referring to the so "fix" that will give insurance regulators the leeway of allowing low-quality insurance plans to continue for additional year. "What we're told in grade school when we study civics is in that building behind you are the two legislative chambers of the federal government, the Senate and the House. It turns out, there's a third. It's called the White House press room, into which the president can, on a whim, sashay and rewrite laws."

"I do think this is a constitutional scandal," Will said. "Suppose the next Republican president — and there will be another Republican president — comes into the press room sometime and says, 'You know, I really think the capital gains tax does not serve the national interest so we're just, as an act of executive discretion, going to quit enforcing that for a few years. That's not the rule of law."