World News Korner

With millions of Americans now signing up for health care plans through the Affordable Care Act, the anti-Obamacare minions change tactics.

Courtesy of Reuters:

Conservative activists opposed to President Barack Obama's healthcare overhaul started a new assault on the Affordable Care Act as more than 2 million people began new health coverage under the law on Thursday.

One group, which is backed by the libertarian billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, launched a $2.5 million television ad campaign that targets three Democratic senators who support the law and could face stiff challenges from Republicans in November elections.

The group, Americans for Prosperity, or AFP, spent more than $36 million on the 2012 elections, largely for ads that bashed the law known as Obamacare and Democrats who supported it.

The ads by AFP are aimed at North Carolina's Kay Hagan, Louisiana's Mary Landrieu and New Hampshire's Jeanne Shaheen. Their bids for re-election will be crucial to Democrats' efforts to keep control of the U.S. Senate, where Democrats control 55 of the 100 seats.

The 30-second videos represent something of a turn in strategy for conservatives, who have spent much of the past year focused on calling for the repeal of the healthcare law, the most sweeping social program since the 1960s.

Now, with more than 2 million people having signed up for Obamacare and more enrolling for coverage every day, AFP and other critics are signaling that in advance of the elections, they will try to cast Democrats as liars who misled Americans about the law.

The new ads try to link the senators to Obama and his discredited pledge that all Americans who liked their healthcare plans before Obamacare went into effect could keep those plans.

That of course relies on belief in the GOP talking point that says 5 million people will lose their current health care plans under Obamacare.

However if California Democratic Senator Henry Waxman has his way that talking point is about to crash head on into a giant factual wall.

This courtesy of Rachel Maddow:

To that end, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Dems on the House Energy and Commerce Committee published a report (pdf) this week intended to bring the debate into sharper focus. As George Zornick reported, Waxman found that even if we use the Republicans’ figure as a dubious baseline, the specific outcomes leave the GOP argument in tatters.

* According to the report, half of the 4.7 million will have the option to renew their 2013 plans, thanks to an administrative fix this year.

* Of the remaining 2.35 million individuals, 1.4 million should be eligible for tax credits through the marketplaces or Medicaid, according to the report.

* Of the remaining 950,000 individuals, fewer than 10,000 people in 18 counties will lack access to an affordable catastrophic plan.

In other words, even giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt, we’re looking at 10,000 Americans on the individual market who (a) can’t keep their existing plan; (b) can’t enroll in Medicaid; (c) can’t get subsidized coverage through an exchange; and (d) can’t get catastrophic coverage.

Or put another way, when Republicans talk about the 5 million people left behind by the ACA, they’re exaggerating by a factor of 500.

Now much like the GOP response to the New York Times article blowing the Benghazi conspiracy out of the water, you can expect a whole lot of cognitive dissonance and misrepresentation of the facts. But that should only energize those of us on the Left to make it our duty to make sure that the truth gets out their far and wide to help undermine efforts to defeat progressives using this mischaracterization of the facts.

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