Emily’s List is urging its supporters to contact members of Congress and tell them to oppose repealing Obamacare. In her e-mail, president Stephanie Schriock claims that “Boehner and the Republicans have grievously misled the public about health care reform from day one.” Yet her e-mail contains a fair bit of misleading information of its own.
For example, she claims that repeal would mean “$230 billion added to the deficit.” Yuval Levin, among others, has dissected the absurd claim that Obamacare somehow saves taxpayers money. At best, from a deficit perspective, the new law reduces the deficit by raking in enough new tax revenue and cutting Medicare enough to offset all the new spending (in which case taxpayers pay more for a significantly expanded government). But it’s highly unlikely that all the new taxes and Medicare cuts contained in Obamacare will be sufficient to cover the law’s explosion of new spending. The only way Democrats could manufacture positive scores from the Congressional Budget Office was by gaming the scoring system.
She writes that Obamacare benefits seniors and reduces the “donut hole” in Medicare’s prescription-drug benefit, but ignores how the law eliminates popular Medicare programs and will attempt to squeeze hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare – which will likely result in less access to quality care – to pay for the broad new entitlement.
Schriock implicitly applauds the regulations that let “children” stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26 and limit insurance companies’ ability to charge different premiums to different people based on factors like gender, but she ignores the very real costs associated with these provisions. Sure, some people benefit from these new mandates, but the costs of those benefits are shifted to everyone else. That’s why premiums are expected to rise faster as Obamacare’s mandates kick in.
Schriock makes it sound as though opponents of Obamacare rejoice at the idea of increasing the ranks of the uninsured. In reality, the reason so many Americans support repeal is that they know there are ways to better reform our health-care system without ceding so much control to the government. Americans don’t want government dictating the type of insurance they have to have. They don’t want to be pushed from their private insurance onto government rolls. They want jobs, and they recognize that our current unemployment problem will be exacerbated by a law that will drive up employment costs.
Schriock may succeed in convincing her already-liberal members to call their congressmen, but these one-sided arguments aren’t going to convince the majority of Americans, who want this counterproductive law repealed.