Answers to the 5 Biggest Liberal Obamacare Myths

Turn on the news and you’d get the impression that the coming repeal of Obamacare is causing a nationwide revolt against the Republican Party. There has been a surge in Republican town halls being interrupted by protesters, shouting everyone down and causing a ruckus.

The backlash over Obamacare’s coming repeal is far out of proportion with the number of Americans supporting it. According to a recent NBC/WSJ poll, only a mere FOUR PERCENT of people say that the law was working well, while 52 percent support repeal.

Heck, with only four percent saying Obamacare is working well, it’s a surprise there’s anyone still defending the law, including liberals.

Still, there are a handful of myths surrounding the law that just won’t die, and obviously they portray the law in a favorable light. Let’s review them:

1. 20 million people will have the rug pulled out from under them if Obamacare is repealed. This is the most common refrain from Obamacare’s apologists, as they howl about how these 20 million are going to lose health care as a result of Obamacare’s repeal. But as Betsy McCaughey has pointed out in The Hill, the vast majority of these 20 million people are enrolled through Medicaid.

To be more specific, 16 million of the aforementioned 20 million are insured through Medicaid, and while their eligibility is tied to Obamacare, that provision would be kept during the replacement part of the “repeal & replace” process.

2. Obamacare has saved lives. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has claimed there will be 36,000 annual deaths if Obamacare is repealed, but the Manhattan Institute’s Oren Crass notes that there haven’t been any lives saved under Obamacare since most of the newly-insured have done so through Medicaid, and “studies of Medicaid do not find the same positive effects on mortality sometimes seen in studies of private insurance,” either showing no effect or a negative effect on mortality. In fact, Crass points out that “mortality in 2015 rose more than 50 percent faster in the 26 states (and Washington, D.C.) that expanded Medicaid during 2014 than in the 24 states that did not.”

The above claim is particularly hilarious, because prior to ObamaCare, the Left’s talking point was that 10,000 people die each year due to lack of health insurance. Now we have ObamaCare and nearly 40,000 will die if we repeal it? Yeah right!

3. If Obamacare is repealed, people with pre-existing conditions won’t have access to health care. Prior to Obamacare 35 states offered high-risk insurance pools for people with pre-existing conditions to purchase health care, and most of the states that didn’t had pre-existing condition mandates similar to what Obamacare requires.

4. Red states that have been able to reject various aspects of Obamacare are responsible for higher premium increases. Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik made this claim in an October op-ed, arguing that “states that fully embraced Obamacare will see increases of 18.2%. Those that fully resist [rejected Medicaid expansions] will see increases of 29.8%.”

#4 is neglecting the real cause of those premium hikes, and it has nothing to do with Red States rejecting Medicaid’s expansion. According to healthcare expert and Forbes analyst Avik Roy, “ObamaCare imposes a one-size-fits-all regulatory scheme upon the insurance market.” He told Fox News in 2013: “So if you’re in a lightly regulated state today, all of a sudden it’s going from a lightly regulated system to a heavily regulated system, and that drives up a lot of the costs.”

In other words, it’s only naturally for states that previously had relatively light regulations in the heath care sector to have higher percentage increases in premiums when they’re suddenly bombarded with Obamacare’s mass regulations.

And the biggest myth of all…

7. Repealing Obamacare will result in higher premiums. A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report that concluded that a bill in Congress that only partially repeals Obamacare “would increase individual market premiums by 20-25 percent in 2018 and around 100 percent by 2026.”

That sounds a little counter-intuitive in light of the skyrocketing premiums and deductibles under ObamaCare doesn’t it? Remember when we were promised that ObamaCare would reduce healthcare premiums by an average of $2,500 by family, only for the opposite to occur in reality?

As Conservative Review‘s Daniel Horowitz pointed out, the bill that the CBO based its calculations off of only “repeals the requirement to purchase health care and the subsidies along with the ACA’s Medicaid expansion.”

“Prices remain high, there is no choice or competition in the marketplace, yet the funding mechanism is cut off,” Horowitz wrote. “This creates a phenomenon of adverse selection and increased premiums. Think about it: if the costly regulations remain in place but you take away the penalty to buy insurance why would someone like me — whose annual health costs have tripled as a result of Obamacare — bother purchasing insurance?”

And of course, an Obamacare repeal would replace all of the parts of the law that are responsible for increasing healthcare costs. 

Who is seriously going to miss this law once it’s gone? No more than four percent of the population, in all likelihood.

H/T The Daily Wire

Which Obamacare myth do you think is the worst? Share your thoughts below! 

By Matt

Matt is the co-founder of Unbiased America and a freelance writer specializing in economics and politics. He’s been published... More about Matt

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