Once again, let me say that the best information on the Affordable Care Act comes from the government. Healthcare.gov.
From Joan, who has been following the ends and outs of the healthcare debate since it started, at the DailyKos:
Obamacare will take the insurance I have away.
Let’s just get this straight: If you already have insurance, Obamacare is not taking it away. If you do lose it, it’s because your employer has dropped your coverage. It’s true that some employers might drop it, either to make a political point or because it would cost them less to pay the penalty for not providing coverage than to continue to carry it. But that’s not something Obamacare is forcing them to do.
Obamacare won’t let me see my doctor anymore.
Trust me, the government doesn’t care what doctor you see. If you have insurance, and you have a primary doctor, that won’t change unless your insurance company decides it will change. The power to force you to find a new doctor is something insurance companies have always had, and still do.
The IRS will control my health care.
That’s a persistent and difficult one to shake. Everyone hates the IRS, so it’s easy to believe the worst here. The IRS has a big role: It’s going to be verifying how much of a subsidy you’re going to be getting to help pay for insurance if you purchase it on the exchange. If you already have health insurance, the IRS will have nothing to do with it, with you, with your health care. They don’t know who your doctor is. They won’t see your medical records. They don’t care about your medical records.
It’s taking Medicare money away from me.
Scaring old people is the easiest and favorite thing for Republicans to do. Obamacare will not make you pay more for your Medicare, it will not take it away, and if you’re on Medicare, you don’t have to do anything at all on Oct. 1. But if you are on Medicare, you will see some additional benefits from Obamacare: more preventative care services and more savings on prescription drug coverage.
Obamacare is going to ration my health care (a corollary of death panels).
Your insurance company already rations your health care, but much of that’s changed with Obamacare: you can now get preventive care services without having a copay; you don’t face annual or lifetime caps on how much your insurance company will pay out for you if you get seriously, chronically ill; your insurance company can’t deem a condition “pre-existing” and refuse to cover it.
The Independent Payment Advisory Board, the supposed death panel, is prohibited in the law from rationing health care. It’s right there in black and white: It cannot make “any recommendation to ration health care … or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria.”
This is a government take-over of health care in America.
We should be so lucky. Your insurance company won’t be going out of business, turning all your records over to the government. The insurance industry will continue to flourish, albeit with some new regulations that even the people propounding this one like, number one being no more pre-existing conditions.
There are a lot more, really crazy, chain-email type ones like “you won’t get cancer treatment after age 76,” or “government workers will force their way into your home to inspect it,” or “this is the biggest tax increase in the history of the world,” or “Obamacare creates a database of people’s sex lives.” Occasionally, PolitiFact is useful debunking lies. They do a good job with these and a handful of others.
But the lies directed toward the uninsured are the ones that really expose just how immoral Republicans are. They are trying to convince people, particularly young people, that it’s better to go without the protection of health insurance to make a political statement. No one cuts through this better than, Brian Beutler, at Salon. A few weeks ago, he wrote about his own experience, being a victim of gun violence, and in a follow-up essay writes about the health care lesson he learned, because by luck and the nagging of his father, he had paid his first insurance premium six hours before getting shot.
One of the arguments I made in my first essay is that it makes no sense to respond to minor risks by taking drastic measures (in that case, I was responding to making sweeping racial judgments based on a lone incident). Nobody should respond to the threat of communicable illness by sheltering indoors like Howard Hughes. Nobody should mitigate the risk of accident by diminishing their quality of life. But buying insurance? That’s like taking a cab through a dangerous neighborhood. It’s a perfectly sensible hedge even if it’s somewhat costlier than the alternative. If it weren’t sensible, millions and millions of people insured by their employers — including, probably, the same people now encouraging young people to skip Obamacare — would be opting out in exchange for additional cash compensation.Obviously people who have insurance already—including young people, who currently cross-subsidize their older colleagues in existing group markets—think it’s a pretty good deal. If you’re eligible for Obamacare, and people try to convince you otherwise, ask yourself if you think they’d be giving their own children the same advice. And your decision will be obvious.
