Last October, when the Affordable Care Act website went live and promptly crashed, when few people were signing up for health care, Republicans looked at the numbers being released and screamed, "Look at the numbers! They clearly show what a miserable failure Obamacare is!"
Today, with the numbers showing 7 million people signed up, the same Republicans are looking at the numbers being released and screaming, "Look at the numbers! They clearly show that the White House is cooking the books on Obamacare!"
what eye thynk: The double standard here raises an obvious question: if the White House was going to cook the books, why didn't they do it in October when everything was so dire? Maybe the problem is that Republicans have such a transitory acquaintance with the truth that they can't recognize or understand it when someone actually uses verity as proof.
Facing the fact that the ACA is not the miserable failure they had hoped for, that it may not be the potent anti-Democrat weapon they had planned on going into the mid-term election, Republicans are now scrambling to find new talking points They apparently have decided--after 51 repeal votes in the House--to drop the word "repeal" and go instead with "replace."
In North Carolina, Karl Rove's Crossroads PAC has begun a new ad campaign for their anointed Senate candidate that talks about his willingness to "replace" the ACA. (No need to upset all those newly insured North Carolinians.) House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has jumped on the new word bandwagon, telling reporters that Congress must continue their work to "replace" the ACA. Again, the absence of the word "repeal" is obvious. We are left to suppose that they will be replacing it with something better, though what that would be exactly remains elusive.
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) appeared on Fox News a few days ago to talk about how the new ACA numbers were nothing but an elaborate fraud perpetrated by liberals. When asked what ideas he had to "replace" (Fox got the new word memo too!) the current law, he answered, "Let's start with the idea that pre-existing illnesses should not deny you coverage, that means you're gonna have to have pools for the really sick, but why would you want to deny somebody insurance because they got sick? Allowing children to stay on the policies up to they're 26 makes sense given this economy and buying policies across state lines makes a lot of sense to me."
All three of his new(?) ideas are already part of the ACA, so one is left to wonder if Mr. Graham has actually ever bothered to read the law he hates so much.
Fox News pundits got in the game by introducing their own brand new anti-ACA arguments this week. They now claim that, even with the new enrollment figures, there are still too many people left uninsured. Old argument: Repeal Obamacare, those uninsured are fine the way they are. New argument: Replace Obamacare. It doesn't do enough for the uninsured. This argument falls apart, (not that I expect anyone at Fox to admit this), when you look at the fact that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a large number of those still without health insurance live in states where Republican leadership has refused to expand Medicaid.
Beyond all the contradictory arguments and the new talking points, the truly salient question remains: Where is the alternative plan Republicans have been promising for the past five years? They have been meeting in secret for 60 months working on a - 1. new, better, more efficient, more fair, less costly plan that would - 2. cover more, sicker, older, younger people while keeping the insurance industry - 3. better funded, more profitable, less hampered by regulations. As of two weeks ago, their work hadn't yielded much beyond a vague outline of some of the things they would like to keep from Obamacare, though they did come up with a snappy new title: "A Stronger Health Care System: The GOP Plan for Freedom, Flexibility & Peace of Mind."
May I suggest an alternative? How about, "ACA, the Plan We Could Have Made Better Five Years Ago If We Hadn't Been So Consumed With Animus Over a Democrat Winning the White House"? Verity, you know.
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