When I joked about the truth dying, I wasn’t entirely unserious. As I discussed yesterday, and as Steve Benen discusses today, the Affordable Care Act has been scored by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) several times, and it always comes back with a report saying that the bill will reduce the budget deficit. Their latest report (pdf), released yesterday, says that ObamaCare will now cost $84 billion less over the next decade than anticipated thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Medicaid expansion, which will cost about 3 million people access to health care. The CBO released a second report yesterday that scored a recently-passed House bill that would repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety. They said that bill would cost the government $109 billion over the next decade. Please understand that repealing ObamaCare would not only cost $109 billion; it would also eliminate the cost savings of the bill which can now be calculated as $294 billion between now and 2023.
The net effect of repealing ObamaCare would be to lose $294 billion in savings and to add $109 in costs, resulting in the loss of $403 billion to the treasury. Keep in mind that the direct costs of the Iraq War were about $700 billion. We are talking about a lot of money here. The Republicans’ bill repealing ObamaCare would, if passed by the Senate and signed by the president, not only cost us in excess of $400 billion, it would deny health care coverage to 30 million Americans. And the GOP has no plan, none, to provide any relief to those 30 million Americans.
Now, go crank up your Google Machine and see how many times the Republicans, including their presidential candidate, have said that ObamaCare is too expensive, is a budget buster, is unfair to our children who will have to pay for it, etc. It’s a mantra with these folks.
The CBO is not just non-partisan. The Republicans currently control the House of Representatives. There is no way for the Democrats to use the CBO as some partisan tool to create the numbers they want.
Now, I understand that it is hard to comprehend how you can give 30 million people health care coverage and wind up saving money. To understand it, you can read the CBO’s report. Here’s the bottom line numbers:
On net, CBO and JCT estimate, repealing the ACA would increase federal budget deficits by $109 billion over the 2013–2022 period. Repealing the coverage provisions discussed in this report would save $1,171 billion over that period, but repealing the rest of the act would increase direct spending and reduce revenues by a total of $1,280 billion.
For the record, the JCT is the Joint Committee on Taxation, which is made up 5 Republicans and 5 Democrats. They co-authored the CBO report, meaning that Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Orrin Hatch of Utah, agree with these numbers. Of course, they’d never admit that out loud on television or radio or to a print journalist.
That’s because, for the GOP, the truth died. Everything they say about health care is a lie.
Everything they say about health care is a lie.
It’s not exclusive to health care.
I don’t remember the last time they told the truth.
No, it shouldn’t be. That’s what’s been so fucked up about the Democratic messaging about this bill. They don’t seem to be able to explain it in steps.
For whatever reason, they don’t just come out and say that it creates huge amounts of new spending. You can’t provide universal coverage without spending trillions. No shit.
But the bill doesn’t just create new spending and leave the rest of the health care sector alone. Nor does it presume to cover the trillion dollars through taxation alone (though that is a component).
The ACA transfers corporate welfare to individual welfare. It uses the money saved from extravagant corporate Medicare Advantage and health care provider subsidies to pay for the individual subsidies and Medicaid expansion. And it restrains expected health care cost growth to reduce expected deficits.
Yeah, it’s a three-part plan. The American people should be expected to be able to count to fucking three. God, this country drives me nuts sometimes.
Fixed.
everything these sociopaths say about ANYTHING is a lie.
Let’s face it, if the Republicans actually told the truth about anything, they would never win another election at any level. Their only hope for continued existence as a party is by lying and hoping enough people swallow the lie.
Due to a cowardly media and a naive population, that hope all too often becomes a reality.
Lewis Powell would be proud.
Facts finally declared dead
I had thought them dead, or to have at least fallen into gross misuse and disuse by close to half of the US population, starting with the rise in rightwinger media acquisitions and the likes of that rightwing slut Rush Limbaugh.
That marked the beginning of the death of the concept of “agreed upon facts” that had long served us well in terms of our ability to deal with the issues we’re collectively confronted with and in need of our collective attention, as well as a means by which to retain the civility in sufficient enough measures to prevent a lack of it from serving as an impediment to successful cooperation. Can anyone reasonably deny that rightwinger dishonesty in the form of all too often, fact-free defamations about others (like all those commies in Congress, and college age sluts, etc), and the frustrations spawned by their living in total denial of inconvenient facts http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/20/468255/republican-meterologist-climate-change-has-nothin
g-to-do-with-al-gore/ (that all too often motivate them in their defamation efforts) underlies and is responsible for, most of the incivility we see in the public square today? And just as obvious to this observer, has been another product of this willful and deliberate killing of the concept of agreed upon facts — the immunity almost all rightwingers have to anything resembling the “Have you no shame sir?” kinda question. In their case, shame has been completely lost as a pov changing/behavior modification tool.
We all know the answer to that question, and members of the party of “NO!” answer it almost daily for those that don’t. The killing of that concept also required the issuance of a license to lie without fear of reprisal from their minions of both the political and financial kind, which made the 9th Commandment a casualty in the modern rightwing “War on Truth”, which came about primarily and is perpetuated by, them knowing they can’t win the debates on the issues honestly, leaving them little choice but to constantly double down on their dishonesty, and I’d argue, this explains the behavior of the lie nympho the Mutt is.
Obviously our salvation on many fronts as a people lies in finding a way to resurrect the concept of agreed upon facts, and the rightwinger lies and denials that stand in the way of that. It however is gonna be just about if not more the daunting task, than BHO and the dems cleaning up the mess the repubs have put this country in (with some help from them in the past) in a fraction of the time it took for them to mess it up.
Maybe we can get someone to bring it up at their next “values” summit. http://www.valuesvotersummit.org/ lol
By REX W. HUPPKE
Published: Monday, April 23, 2012 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, April 22, 2012 at 4:37 p.m.
Page 1 of 3
A quick review of the long and illustrious career of Facts reveals some of the world’s most cherished absolutes: Gravity makes things fall down; 2 + 2 = 4; the sky is blue.
But for many, Facts’ most memorable moments came in simple day-to-day realities, from a child’s certainty of his mother’s love to the comforting knowledge that a favorite television show would start promptly at 8 p.m.
Over the centuries, Facts became such a prevalent part of most people’s lives that Irish philosopher Edmund Burke once said: “Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.”
To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered recently when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of the U.S. House of Representatives are communists
more here http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20120423/WIRE/120429858/1033/news?p=1&tc=pg&tc=ar