-By Warner Todd Huston
It really is the most amazing thing, this Republican Health Care Bill. Usually, as a partisan, you can point to the lies from one corner of the political world and screech about how unfair it all is. But in the case of this latest Republican-sponsored health care bill, the sad fact is that all four of the most interested parties in this debate are simply lying outright about what this bill does.
When the GOP leadership of the House of Representatives finally passed its latest attempt to address the problems of Obamacare, the American Health Care Act (AHCA), the White House and the Republican Party celebrated that they finally set in motion the repealing of Obamacare. Unfortunately, the AHCA does not do that at all.
President Trump led the cheerleading with tweets and press conferences about the House plan.
It was a GREAT day for the United States of America! This is a great plan that is a repeal & replace of ObamaCare. Make no mistake about it. pic.twitter.com/fYtghBlXxS
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 5, 2017
The truth is, the AHCA neither repeals nor replaces Obamacare. All it does is nibble around the edges of Obama’s disastrous takeover of the nation’s healthcare system.
The House of Representatives is also trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the country by trying to make it seem as if they just repealed Obamacare. Republicans, of course, are desperate to make it appear as they have fulfilled a campaign promise. Since Obamacare was passed Republicans from coast to coast, have been promising to rid the country of Obamacare if only the voters will give them the White House and majorities in both houses. With the 2017 election they now have it, yet they have spent the fist 100 and some odd days of Trump’s presidency failing to do the one major thing they said they’d do once put in full power: eliminate Obamacare.
So, by characterizing the AHCA as a “repeal and replacement” of Obamacare, House Republicans are hoping voters take that at face value and imagine that they have fulfilled a campaign promise.
But the GOP’s AHCA only makes changes to Obamacare without either eliminating it or replacing it with a brand new structure. The AHCA essentially leaves the framework of Obamacare in place.
So, on the right side of the aisle, both the president and the GOP are lying about this bill. But the lies on the left side of the aisle are even thicker as both the media and the Democrats struggle to make political hay of the bill.
The Democrats have unleashed a tidal wave of lies about the AHCA in order to enrage voters and fool them into thinking the GOP has destroyed Obama’s signature achievement.
Firstly, the left-wing party is selling the lie that the AHCA takes away Obama’s sop to preexisting conditions. They are claiming that sick people will be thrown off their insurance and that since they are sick, they won’t be able to get a new policy.
But it is simply a lie that the new AHCA eliminates Obama’s preexisting conditions protections.
Democrats and the media both are also claiming that rape will become a “preexisting condition” that will be denied by the GOP healthcare bill. It isn’t true and even the left-wing “fact checker” at Politifact calls this a lie.
Finally, there is one more interested party in this discussion that is lying to the American people about what the GOP’s AHCA does.
The media is losing its tiny, collective, little hive mind over the claim that the AHCA “repeals Obamacare.”
Now, unlike the GOP which is claiming the bill repeals Obamacare to assuage its increasingly disgruntled voter base, the media is claiming that the AHCA repeals Obamacare in order to hurt the GOP by using the false claim as a weapon against Republicans. The media’s characterization of this false “repeal” claim is that it proves Republicans don’t care about sick people and so they are trying to kill us all by rolling back Obama’s famous law.
So, what of this bill? Is this bill really that terrible? Not really. It isn’t great, but Trump is right when he says it is better than Obamacare. Unfortunately, it is only marginally better than Obamacare. But in the end it doesn’t do anything that these four interested parties say it does.
The White House, the Republican Party, the Democrat Party and the media are all lying to your face about what the GOP’s American Health Care Act does. It isn’t a repeal or a replacement of Obamacare, and it doesn’t end preexisting conditions. Period.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as Constitution.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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