When truthiness backfires.
It's really no wonder that Republicans are utterly bankrupt when it comes to healthcare reform. At one time they had some ideas, and some of those ideas ended up in Romneycare, and from there some of them ended up in Obamacare. Which caused them all to have to be completely repudiated by all right-thinking Republicans and replaced with, well,
platitudes and gibberish. Nothing makes it more clear that they have absolutely nothing more than one of their big brains trying to critique Obamacare.
That big brain would be Stephen Moore, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation attempting to make an intellectual argument that Obamacare has not achieved the economic goals President Obama promised (because all arguments from right have to be premised on "Obama lied!"). Here, Jonathan Chait details how every single assertion that Moore makes is just a big lie. All of it. Well, except for the one that "is hard to substantiate or refute […] because it is not even an English sentence."
"A new Congressional Budget Office report has blown the lid off the Obama whopper fib" that reform could shrink the deficit? No, pretty much the opposite, in fact. And from there, since he uses that fictional CBO report as his jumping off point, it's all just nonsense. "Stampede of rising health costs!" Skyrocketing premiums! Government takeover! But, if you're a Republican, it is chock full of truthiness. It should all be the truth about Obamacare, because it feels like it should be true because there's absolutely no way that this thing they hate so much, from a president they hate so much, could could actually be working as well as it clearly is.
Scott Lemieux smartly connects Moore's massive load of bullshit to the issue at the forefront of Obamacare right now: King vs. Burwell. The case is pretty much built of layer upon layer of truthiness, from the premise that Congress didn't mean to make the Affordable Care Act affordable to plaintiffs who probably don't actually legally qualify to make the claims that they're making about how the law has hurt them. It doesn't even rise to the level of smoke and mirrors because there's nothing remotely plausible there. But when you've got at least four of the nine Supreme Court justices on your side, you're good to go.
Here's the larger problem for the right, though, if their fondest wish is granted and their Supreme Court fairy godmother grants them a destroyed Obamacare: reality. That would be reality in the form of at least 8.2 million people—predominantly white, middle-class, Southern, Republican people—who will have their brand-new insurance yanked away from them and who are going to be demanding a fix.