That nose should be two feet long.
Glenn Kessler, the
Washington Post's fact-checker extraordinaire,
levels a very rare Four Pinocchios at Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) for, what else, an Obamacare lie. Not just any Obamacare lie, but the favorite one these days to answer the law's amazing enrollment success: "Nuh-uh! There are
more uninsured people now!" Because now, of course, the thing repeal-obsessed Republicans
care about most is how many people are uninsured.
Here's Huelskamp's version of it: "It's hard to get accurate numbers on anything. But the numbers we see today is that—as I understand them—we believe there are more people uninsured today in Kansas than there were before the president’s health-care plan went into effect. And I thought the goal was to bring more people into insurance."
Yes, it is very hard to get those numbers, but the numbers at experts' disposal in Kansas so far don't say anything at all like there are more uninsured people now than before the law. The 2013 numbers aren't in yet, but they know that there were some 357,000 uninsured people in 2012 in Kansas, which is pretty consistent with the previous five years. They also know that 29,309 Kansans had signed up for health care on the federal exchanges as of March 1. Kansas didn't take Medicaid expansion, but the estimate is that another 10,000 or so eligible people would have come out of the woodwork. And, "it turns out few plans were canceled in Kansas despite initial reports that thousands of plans might be terminated."
Which means Huelskamp just made all that up, and as Kessler says:
Huelskamp can be as big a critic of the law as he wants, but he’s not entitled to conjure phony facts out of thin air.
Of course, he's a Republican so he
feels entitled to do just that. The larger point, though, is that Huelskamp doesn't give two shits about how many uninsured people there are. He wants to repeal the law, which means taking insurance away from all these people!