{"id":304581,"date":"2017-04-20T16:52:43","date_gmt":"2017-04-20T15:52:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/obamacare-is-actually-working\/"},"modified":"2017-04-20T16:52:43","modified_gmt":"2017-04-20T15:52:43","slug":"obamacare-is-actually-working","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/obamacare-is-actually-working\/","title":{"rendered":"Obamacare Is Actually Working"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"pf-content\">\n<p>Question: What do you get when you mix a barrel of fables, a sack of mendacity, and a gross of whoppers \u2013 topped with a thick layer of subterfuge? Answer: The fiasco that&#8217;s been the Republican attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re going to do something that&#8217;s great,&#8221; The Donald trumpeted when he endorsed House Speaker Paul Ryan&#8217;s now-dead bill to displace Obamacare. But Trumpcare was &#8220;great&#8221; only in the sense that it was a great-big bloated concoction of lies.<\/p>\n<p>Start with the original lie that right-wing Republicans have harped on for nearly a decade: Obamacare is a total failure.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll &#8220;repeal and replace&#8221; it as soon as we get control of the national government, they shouted. Then, when Trump happened, he made killing Obama&#8217;s Affordable Care Act his top legislative priority. Ryan chimed in with a perfect imitation of Chicken Little, squawking that the ACA is in a &#8220;death spiral.&#8221;<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_33110\" style=\"width: 598px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-33110\" src=\"http:\/\/otherwords.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/19147945222_ca26f3c3d7_b-600x600.jpg\" alt=\"health-care-obamacare\" width=\"588\" height=\"588\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">(Photo: Flickr\/ LaDawna Howard)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>In fact, the president and the speaker were lying.<\/p>\n<p>While Obamacare has flaws that require fixing, overall it&#8217;s been a tremendous success. It has reduced by almost half the number of Americans who had no health coverage (benefitting especially many white working-class people who had supported Trump). Moreover, the overwhelming majority of the millions who gained ACA coverage are satisfied and glad to have it.<\/p>\n<p>Undeterred, the Trumpsters tried another Chicken Little tale. The health law is doomed, they squawked, because it&#8217;s been unprofitable for the insurance giants, so they&#8217;re withdrawing.<\/p>\n<p>Bogus! In fact, the profits of Aetna, Cigna, Humana, UnitedHealth, and other managed care corporations have <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/03\/18\/business\/health-insurers-profit.html\">soared under Obamacare<\/a>. The biggest one, UnitedHealth, has seen the value of its shares skyrocket by a spectacular 480 percent since the ACA expansion of Medicaid.<\/p>\n<p>Now we know why Trump &amp; Company are so hostile to truth based news \u2014 actual facts expose their lies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>This piece was reprinted from <a href=\"http:\/\/otherwords.org\/obamacare-is-actually-working\/\">Other Words<\/a> by <a href=\"http:\/\/rinf.com\">RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Question: What do you get when you mix a barrel of fables, a sack of mendacity, and a gross of whoppers \u2013 topped with a thick layer of subterfuge? Answer: The fiasco that&#8217;s been the Republican attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. &#8220;We&#8217;re going to do something that&#8217;s great,&#8221; The Donald trumpeted when he [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2523,"featured_media":298241,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-304581","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2523"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/298241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}