LA Times on GOP Fatuous Gobbledygook on Health Care Legislation

I am in receipt of Trey Hollingsworth’s email claiming Obamacare was a failure. It is so typical of the false GOP talking points that I am responding by email contact form to Hollingsworth, and to Senators Donnelly and Young on Indiana.

This is what Hollingwsorth had to say.

Despite what Americans were promised, Obamacare failed to lower healthcare costs or improve access to care. The exchanges created by the law are collapsing beneath themselves, leaving Americans with less affordable and less effective healthcare options. The time to fix our broken healthcare system has long past.

The AHCA maintains protections for the most vulnerable, forbidding insurers from denying coverage to or charging higher premiums to those with preexisting conditions, and removes the coercive individual mandate. The AHCA puts an end to the one-size-fits all, top down approach of Obamacare and provides states with flexibility enabling Hoosiers to choose which plans work best for them and their families. Health care decisions belong in the hands of patients and their doctors, not D.C. bureaucrats.

My only question is, how hard is it to look yourself in the mirror every day when you know you are lying? Or, as the article referenced below from the LA Times states at one point:

This is nothing but fatuous gobbledygook. The GOP has had six years to come up with an alternative plan, and never has done so. Its current strategy is to repeal the Affordable Care Act now, and then cook up a replacement sometime in the next two, three, even four years. (They can’t even agree on a time frame.) What exactly is a “patient-centered system,” anyway?

This article from Jan 4, 2017, lays out why these GOP talking points are blatant lies. I have included the text. Use your web browser and go to the article to see the charts. Which anyone interested in the truth and facts and reality would do.

Republicans call Obamacare a ‘failure.’ These 7 charts show they couldn’t be more wrong

Congressional Republicans, evidently hoping that by repeating an untruth they’ll convince American voters, and perhaps themselves, that it’s a truth, on Wednesday said the Affordable Care Act has “failed.”

The undistilled version of this view came from House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who emerged Wednesday from a meeting with Vice President-elect Mike Pence to assert: “This law has failed. Americans are struggling. The law is failing while we speak. … Things are only getting worse under Obamacare. … The healthcare system has been ruined — dismantled — under Obamacare.”

Every one of those statements is demonstrably untrue. How do we know this? We know because every measure of healthcare spending, access and cost has improved since the passage and implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Timothy McBride of Washington University in St. Louis has done the heavy lifting of pulling together the relevant charts and graphs, and posting them online in a series of 12 tweets compiled on Storify. We’ve culled some of the most important, and present them here.

We should add, first, that Ryan also pledged, once the GOP repeals the law, to “make sure that there is a stable transition to a truly patient-centered system. We want every American to have access to quality, affordable health coverage”

This is nothing but fatuous gobbledygook. The GOP has had six years to come up with an alternative plan, and never has done so. Its current strategy is to repeal the Affordable Care Act now, and then cook up a replacement sometime in the next two, three, even four years. (They can’t even agree on a time frame.) What exactly is a “patient-centered system,” anyway?

Los Angeles Times Jan 4, 2017

Republicans call Obamacare a ‘failure.’ These 7 charts show they couldn’t be more wrong

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Author: Ron