This could be a hunch, but I suspect that vulnerable congressional Democrats are going to regret Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid having prematurely kicked off 2014 election season by declaring his party’s campaign slogan to be ‘All Obamacare Victims Are Liars.’
After regaling his colleagues with the glories of Obamacare, Reid warned recently, “Despite all that good news, there’s plenty of horror stories being told. All of them are untrue, but they’re being told all over America. … those tales, turned out to be just that: tales, stories made up from whole cloth, lies distorted by the Republicans to grab headlines or make political advertisements.”
Reid is far from the only liberal claiming Obamacare victims are an urban myth. Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik mused, “Maybe there are no genuine Obamacare horror stories.” Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum demanded, “Has anyone in America actually been harmed by Obamacare?” The ever-certifiable Paul Krugman decried “Health Care Horror Hooey” in the headline of one of his pieces.
Yet according to a recent Rasmussen survey, one third of Americans report that they personally have been hurt by Obamacare. Projecting to the entire U.S. population, that’s an awful lot of liars.
Supporting Obamacare because you believe it will help the needy, even if the middle class and well-off will suffer, is one thing. Downplaying the cost of redistributing wealth through government subsidies is Democratic boilerplate. But claiming that there is literally no downside to a law this big and complicated, that not one single person will be adversely affected by it, is borderline demented.
Over the past six months, millions of Americans have lost their health care plans; many haven’t been able to find equivalent replacement coverage; some have watched their life-threatening illnesses worsen due to discontinuity of care; millions have wasted hours scouring poky online exchanges; people’s premiums are increasing while they’re being forced to pay for coverage they don’t need; and employees are having their hours cut or losing their jobs.
Yet liberals argue, No one has been hurt by Obamacare, or if they have, it was unnecessary. If only they’d spent hours researching dozens of plans and generating spreadsheets to compare premiums and deductibles, they’d find a plan we think is better for them. The Left believes that, because trained investigative reporters with access to insurance executives and Consumer Reports writers sleuth around for hours comparing the costs of various plans, little old ladies who are scared of computers should be ashamed of themselves for not doing the same.
In liberals’ minds, stories of frustration and hardship don’t rise to the level of “horror” unless patients’ Obamacare doctors are sporting hockey masks and chainsaws.
Though the Left has poked holes in the stories of a few cancer victims, there are numerous other reliable stories out there — see Stephen Blackwood, Jeff and Victoria Haidet, Linda Deright, Tom Gialanella, and Julie Stovall — that they haven’t been able to deconstruct.
If Democrats don’t start acknowledging the people hurt by the Affordable Care Act and support its delay or repeal, they may find that they are the ones with the Obamacare horror stories in November.
