A New Republican Lie about ObamaCare

Given the rollout difficulties the Obama administration have had implementing the Affordable Care Act, critics with have the brains God gave a special-needs cockroach would latch onto that meme and keep hammering.  Fortunately, the above description overestimates the intellectual acumen of the Republican Party by a wide margin.  Were that not so, they would not come up with lies as easy to debunk as their latest, that ending “job lock” takes jobs out of the economy.

One of the best arguments for health-insurance reform is that our traditional employer-based system often locked people into jobs they wanted to leave but couldn’t because they feared they wouldn’t be able to get affordable coverage elsewhere.

This worry was pronounced for people with pre-existing conditions but not limited to them. Consider families with young children in which one of the parents would like to get out of the formal labor market for a while to take care of the kids. In the old system, the choices of such couples were constrained if only one of the two received employer-provided family coverage.

Or ponder the fate of a 64-year-old with a condition that leaves her in great pain. She has the savings to retire but can’t exercise this option until she is eligible for Medicare. Is it a good thing to force her to stay in her job? Is it bad to open her job to someone else?

By broadening access to health insurance, the Affordable Care Act ends the tyranny of “job lock,” which is what the much-misrepresented Congressional Budget Office study of the law released on Tuesday shows. The new law increases both personal autonomy and market rationality by ending the distortions in behavior the old arrangements were creating.

But that’s not how the study has been interpreted, particularly by enemies of the law. Typical was a tweet from the National Republican Congressional Committee declaring that “#ObamaCare is hurting the economy, will cost 2.5 millions [sic] jobs.”… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Truthdig>

Chris Hayes explained this and pointed out why the misunderstanding of this report is so widespread.

For the most part, media has just parroted this Republican lie, by focusing on what Republicans are saying, but ignoring what the underlying CBO report actually said, leaving voters misinformed.  Therefore, it’s up to people like us to make sure the truth gets out.

This is the truth.  Eliminating “job lock” will have no effect at all on the number of jobs available.  However, it will lower the unemployment rate, because many people leaving these jobs will not be seeking other work, and they will be replaced with people, who have been seeking work.  So in the process, it will save taxpayers billions in unemployment benefits.

This also the truth.  RepubliCare, the Republican alternative to ObamaCare, is nothing but returning healthcare to Big Insurance control, with even fewer restrictions than there were before ObamaCare was implemented.  It does, however, offer the RepubliCare Death Benefit.  Anyone who cannot pay gets to die for free.