NBC’s Chuck Todd continued to be the Republican
Party’s best friend by letting John Boehner tell two gigantic lies about
the ACA on Meet The Press.
Chuck Todd confronted Boehner about his wrong
Obamacare predictions that fewer people would have health care under the
ACA and that Obamacare would kill jobs.
Boehner replied, “Obamacare made it harder for
employers to hire people. The economy expands and as a result you’re
going to have more employees because businesses have to. But you can ask
any employer in America and ask them if Obamacare has made it harder to
hire employees because it’s a fact. Um, yeah. Do you know why there’re
more people insured? Because a lot more people are on Medicaid, and you
know giving people Medicaid insurance is almost like giving them
nothing. Because there aren’t, you can’t find a doctor that will see
Medicaid patients, and so where do they end up? In the same place, they
used to end up, in the emergency room.”
Todd weakly asked, “So you don’t see Obamacare as good for the country?”
If Chuck Todd had done even the most basic research,
he would have known that Speaker Boehner was lying. Boehner’s claim
that the numbers of insured Americans is so high because of the Medicaid
expansion alone was false. A Kaiser Family Foundation
study found, “The survey finds that nearly six in ten of those now
covered by Exchange plans were uninsured prior to signing up. The
previously uninsured are one of the groups most likely to believe they
have benefited from the ACA, and seven in ten of them say they would not
have gotten coverage without the law.”
Boehner’s other claim that employers all say that Obamacare has made hiring more difficult was also not true. A poll by the National Association of Business Economics (NABE)
that surveyed four sectors of the economy found that seventy-five
percent of business owners said that the ACA has not impacted their
hiring practices. An additional 85% said that they didn’t expect the ACA
to impact their hiring practices in the future.
NBC’s Chuck Todd should not have let Speaker Boehner
put these lies out there unchallenged. Todd’s lay down and die brand of
journalism is the reason so many Americans don’t trust the mainstream
press and don’t bother to tune into the Sunday morning shows.
John
Boehner can’t defend his desire to repeal Obamacare, so he had to lie
in order to justify taking away health insurance from tens of millions
of Americans. Chuck Todd does not believe that he has a responsibility to call out wingnut lies, and his willingness to let Boehner’s lies slide typify his consistent enabling of Republican falsehoods.
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