Graphic Evidence

June 12, 2015 JanF News and Opinion 4

From the anals annals of right-wing world, comes this new thing: Obamacare Truthers …

In an interview with the Trussville Tribune earlier this week, freshman Rep. Gary Palmer (R-AL) declared that, on net, no additional people have gained insurance since the passage of Obamacare. “I’m not sure that’s true that more people are covered,” Palmer declared after the host noted that more people have health care today than in 2010. “There’s just about as many people uninsured now as there were before the Affordable Care Act.”

Of course, when your political philosophy, teapartyism, requires ignoring pesky things like facts even a pictoral representation of the numbers can’t penetrate your ideological fog.

Lies from Gallup?

That ThinkProgress article included a link to this wonderfully titled piece by Jonathan Chait, also discussing that graph: “Uninsured Rate Falls Again for Random Reason Totally Unrelated to Obamacare”

Not long ago, the hypothesis that Obamacare would substantially reduce the uninsured rate was a point of fierce ideological disagreement. The National Center for Policy Analysis, a major conservative health-care think tank, predicted in 2013, “the massive law that was enacted to solve the problem of the uninsured in America is more likely to worsen it.” “At the end of the day, for all of the rhetoric and promises about what Obamacare would achieve, the health law’s most ardent supporters have stuck to their guns because of one thing: coverage expansion,” wrote Avik Roy, a leading Republican health-care adviser, in 2014. “But new data suggests that Obamacare may fail even to achieve this goal.” Obamacare would result in “essentially the same number of uninsured,” insisted Charles Krauthammer in February 2014.

Chait suggests that “it is starting to look possible that this trend is not some random fluke that has happened six straight quarters but is somehow related to the enactment of Obamacare.”

p.s. Rep. Palmer also contends that temperatures are not rising but are actually falling!

Lies from NOAA?

4 Comments

  1. The celebration of ignorance is perhaps the most disturbing element of teapartyism.

  3. Booman, on the R’s “chaos and confusion”……

    How Did This Happen to the GOP?

    It’s just a vortex of stupid that is devouring everything in its path. The architects of this vortex are as varied as Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales and Regent University jurisprudence, neoconservative foreign policy, the mighty right-wing media wurlitzer, the campaign finance laws, the lack of any accountability for anything ever, the things defending torture does to the human spirit and the brain, the folks who will pay any price to keep science from interfering with their bottom line, what happens when you have to lower your standards to make Ed Meese and Sarah Palin acceptable…

    ~snip~

    This is what happens when virtually every malevolent force in the country is allowed to pursue their path in an uncoordinated way, chipping, chipping, chipping away at the institutions of the country and the decency of everyday folks.

    It doesn’t end in the glorious victory of the Conservative Revolution. It ends in chaos and confusion.

    One of our two allowed political parties is defunct and yet somehow controls Congress and most of the states.

    Almost unbelievably and despite their remarkable electoral successes, they need to be fired just like Michael Steele…before they really win something.

    • It is very sad. We desperately need to shift the Overton Window back to the left … that the politics and person of Sarah Palin would be considered “Acceptable” is mind boggling.

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