Want Real Fake News? Try the WSJ Editorial on Last Ditch Effort to Repeal ACA

So Many Lies, So Little Blog Space

The Republicans in the Senate are making a last ditch effort to repeal ACA in the final days of the government's fiscal year. The deal this time is to

1. Repeal the mandates which will drive premiums up dramatically and drive up the number of uninsured.

2. Change the funding to block grants to the states which will take money away from Dem states and give money to GOP states along with cutting funding to Medicaid and premium support.

3. Allow states to waive requirements for comprehensive coverage resulting in insurance companies offering policy which will be insurance in name only.

This will probably get a vote in the Senate, with a 50-50 chance of passing. In support the WSJ wrote an editorial that is so bad it may well be in the Hall of Fame for bad policy analysis.

The bill replaces money spent on tax credits and Medicaid expansion with block grants to states, which would allow Governors to experiment with insurance reforms. Another selling point is that a rejiggered formula will divvy up federal dollars more equitably, as states such as Massachusetts and California haul in an outsize share under current law.

Experiment with reforms means gutting coverage requirements. And the reason Massachusetts and California get more money than say, North Carolina is that those states expanded Medicaid with the Feds paying for it while states that got less money got less money because they did not. And now they would be rewarded for denying health care coverage to people.

The Obama Administration’s Medicaid expansion enrolled working-age, childless adults above the poverty line, and the feds footed most of the bill to bait states to participate. 

For some reason conservatives think people who work but don't make enough money to buy health care insurance shouldn't get health care. Don't know the logic there. And the feds footing the bill meant that the states could expand Medicaid without burdening their budget or their taxpayers. Somehow this is a bad thing?

And then there is this.

ObamaCare’s exchanges will continue to deteriorate, and Democrats will blame Republicans for every premium increase from here to November 2018.

I guess even though they are in the news business the WSJ editors don't follow the news. If they did they would know that now every county has ACA insurers. They would know that increases in premiums are the result of Trumpers trying  to sabotage the program. They would know that a large number of insured are not subject to premium increases because they receive subsidies that limit their costs.

But of course they don't want to know any of this. Reality would contradict their positions.