Fake News About Obamacare Repeal

The American Spectator reports:

If you are among the few Americans who still take the legacy media seriously, you probably believe that repealing Obamacare will result in a cataclysm comparable to that which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Since Donald Trump won the presidential election, countless “news” stories have appeared in “serious” outlets with headlines such as this howler from the Atlantic: “Repealing Obamacare Could Leave 59 Million Americans Uninsured” and this balderdash from the Washington Post: “Hospitals warn Trump, Congress of massive losses with Affordable Care Act repeal.” These are classic examples of fake news from the people who invented the genre.

To get a sense of how misleading these headlines really are, read the Washington Post story. It’s about a letter sent to congressional leaders by the American Hospital Association (AHA) and the Federation of American Hospitals (FAH) pointing out that a repeal bill should include a provision that rescinds Obamacare’s huge cuts in Medicare and Medicaid payments to hospitals. The author of the piece, Amy Goldstein, has mined the letter for scary passages while scrupulously ignoring its most newsworthy assertion — that repeal legislation introduced by Donald Trump’s nominee for HHS secretary, Tom Price, “would protect hospitals from destabilizing cuts.”

Goldstein fails to mention that crucial passage, which reads thus: “ACA repeal and replace legislation sponsored by Department of Health and Human Services Secretary-nominee Tom Price is an example of providing a ‘clean slate,’ which would protect hospitals from destabilizing cuts that would jeopardize access to high-quality services.” Nor does she include any information about Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. Oddly enough, though, Goldstein finds room for the following scary quote: “[R]epealing the Affordable Care Act could cost hospitals $165 billion by the middle of the next decade and trigger ‘an unprecedented public health crisis.’”

This is particularly dishonest because the $165 billion is the amount of money the hospitals agreed to give up because the Democrats promised that “reform” would provide enough newly insured patients to offset them. Obamacare never produced the promised number of newly insured patients, of course, which is one of the reasons half of U.S. hospitals are losing money. Before they were tricked into endorsing the “Affordable Care Act,” hospitals that treated large numbers of such patients received Medicare inflation increases

The ObamaCare fraud continues.