World News Korner

Sean Hannity trots out examples of "average Americans" who are suffering due to Obamacare. Salon reporter smells a rat, follows up, and lo and behold finds rats aplenty.

Courtesy of Salon:

I happened to turn on the Hannity show on Fox News last Friday evening. “Average Americans are feeling the pain of Obamacare and the healthcare overhaul train wreck,” Hannity announced, “and six of them are here tonight to tell us their stories.” Three married couples were neatly arranged in his studio, the wives seated and the men standing behind them, like game show contestants.

As Hannity called on each of them, the guests recounted their “Obamacare” horror stories: canceled policies, premium hikes, restrictions on the freedom to see a doctor of their choice, financial burdens upon their small businesses and so on.

“These are the stories that the media refuses to cover,” Hannity interjected.

But none of it smelled right to me. Nothing these folks were saying jibed with the basic facts of the Affordable Care Act as I understand them. I understand them fairly well; I have worked as a senior adviser to a governor and helped him deal with the new federal rules.

I decided to hit the pavement. I tracked down Hannity’s guests, one by one, and did my own telephone interviews with them.

Salon reporter Eric Strern soon learns that the first "average American" suffering under the oak of Obamacare oppression, Paul Cox of Leicester, N.C., owns a business with only four employees, That is well below the 50 employees which would soon force it to provide company health insurance.

When asked to expalin just how the Affordable Care Act was affecting his business, he said he would get back to Stern.

He never did. (Oops!)

The second "average American" suffering greatly due to Obamacare, Allison Denijs, had never even tried to get on the exchange to see if they might offer her a better deal, claiming that she heard it was too hard to get on.

So Stern gets on the exchange on her behalf and finds that she would see a 60 percent reduction from what she is paying now. That does not exactly seem like something that would cause suffering to me.

The third example of "average Americans" who had their rights stripped away by the tyrannical President Obama, was Robbie and Tina Robison from Franklin, Tenn, who claimed their insurance agent had told them their rates would go up 50 to 75 percent.

They also had not visited the exchanges, and when Stern served as their surrogate, he found that instead of going up the coverage they qualified for was actually 63 percent less than they had been paying BEFORE the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

So here's the question. Does the Sean Hannity show simply have the laziest most inept producers and researchers on cable news? OR did Hannity simply want these stories to be true so much that he simply took them at their word and refused to do any actually journalism?

I think you know what I think.

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