Bill O’Reilly reached new levels of despicable two nights ago when he proclaimed himself some kind of champion of truth while letting forth a slew of anti-Obama supposition. Without offering anything that could be considered as real evidence, O'Reilly announced that President Obama has some kind of covert plan to destroy everyone’s health insurance so that he can take it over and enact a single-payer system instead. I guess proof is for little people.
O’Reilly started his demagoguery in the middle of a Talking Points commentary in which he pointed to a Washington Post fact check about a White House effort to blame insurance companies for canceling plans. The Post concluded that that was misleading because the administration wrote the rules that all but guaranteed such a thing would happen.
Assuming the Post’s conclusion was correct and fair, there was nothing in it to suggest any ulterior motive beyond an effort to pin the blame for the dropped coverage on the health insurance industry.
But O’Reilly knows better, apparently. Or, even worse, he slyly decided to use the Post's fact check as cover for baseless accusations. And then hold himself up as some kind of champion of truth at the same time. O'Reilly said:
(O)nce again, the analysis by a liberal newspaper, the Obama administration is not telling the truth.
So what exactly is the truth? Here it is. If you are a health insurance company, you are now required to offer a bunch of services that may not be good for business such as maternity and newborn care to 90-year- olds. And mental health and substance abuse coverage for everybody. So some companies are simply canceling the policies because they can’t make money on them or because the policies themselves don’t comply with the new mandates from the feds. So they have to cancel.
President Obama knew that would happen and he actually wants it to happen because it forces Americans into the Obamacare exchanges to get new policies, many of which are more expensive. Remember, remember. The goal of President Obama and the Democratic Party is for the government to control the entire healthcare industry. That’s called the single-payer system.
If private insurance companies get out of the healthcare business the feds take on more power and eventually will run the entire show setting premium rates and dictating prices for medical services.
But the President will never tell us any of that.
…Now, my analysis is not ideological. In fact, as you may know, I think some right-wing ideologues are actually helping President Obama by attacking him personally. We don’t do that here. And that has frustrated some Factor viewers.
…The way to overturn the progressive movement in America is to vote the rascals out. That’s the only way it’s going to happen. And in order to do that, you have to defeat the progressives with facts. Not throw out hate stuff.
This is worse than spin. It’s outright propaganda based on either O’Reilly’s paranoia or else deliberate fictionalizing.
Not a few of us on the left have fantasized the same thing.
I don’t think that was the intent, but I do think that the folks in the White House, and many in Congress, have thought to themselves that if it does crash and burn, that will be the obvious alternative.
Except that O’Reilly has never been offering a compromise – he’s been hacking away at the ACA and at Obama since the beginning. The point of his “reasonable” alternative would be to effectively kill the ACA by pushing it off for a year to make it possible for a new GOP majority to repeal it assuming that all goes according to the Fox News playbook. Best case for them, the GOP wins big in the midterms as they normally do and then they can instantly repeal the whole thing and override any veto from President Obama. But that won’t really work if the ACA continues to bring people into the exchanges over the next year. And O’Reilly isn’t thinking particularly realistically. The more likely scenario next year is that the GOP loses ground due to all the extreme hard right members refusing to work with anyone else. Meaning that they don’t get the Senate and may lose even more ground in the House. If they inflict another shutdown in January or February, they could even wind up handing the House back to the Dems.
(As a sidenote, that might be an actual thought on the part of the higher-ups in the GOP – to give the hardliners enough rope to hang themselves, and then have the clout with voters to sweep them out of the way. Of course, that assumes that an increasingly angry and frantic hard right GOP base will understand the reason why they are losing elections. So far, they don’t seem to have been getting the message…)
Getting back to O’Reilly, his wild accusation about Single Payer doesn’t hold water for the most basic of reasons. President Obama and the Dems specifically gave up on the Public Option as part of their many gives to the GOP while the ACA was moving through Congress. Most people in the US support a Single Payer system, as it would obviously be the cheapest and simplest way to go. But the GOP rabidly opposes it, as this would both eliminate the insurance industry from what’s been a lucrative market for them and it would create another government program that the GOP would be unable to touch. So the Dems and President Obama only included a weaker Public Option in the original version of the ACA along with all the GOP ideas about “individual mandate” and so on. When the GOP congresspeople screamed about the Public Option, the Dems took it out, among other things, thinking that would help get the GOP to start actually trying to work on the bill with them. Instead, the GOP folded their arms, stomped their feet and refused to participate, other than to repeatedly try to use parliamentary tactics to kill the ACA before it could get out of committee or either house.
This wasn’t a bill passed “in the dead of night” although it did wind up passing without GOP votes. It was passed in broad daylight, with the GOP actively refusing to participate in the process. The GOP wasn’t ignored. They were repeatedly encouraged to help. The Dems caved multiple times on multiple aspects of the bill, and it was never enough for the GOP. Because the goal of the GOP was for the bill to not go anywhere. They wanted a repeat of what they did to Hillary Clinton in the 1990s, when they sandbagged her attempt at health care reform at that time. The idea here was to block everything President Obama did, and then campaign on the notion that he was a “failure” who couldn’t get anything done. When they themselves failed at this strategy, they responded with a series of temper tantrums and further attempts at obstruction. Part of this took the form of the GOP insisting that states be able to regulate the ACA individually rather than having everything done at the federal level. After the Dems caved on this, the GOP responded by having nearly every GOP governor and state house refuse to do anything to support the ACA – which was a backdoor way of not funding it, among other levels of obstruction. Many of those same GOP state officials also filed suit, in an attempt to get a conservative Supreme Court to throw the ACA out – and had this idea worked, it would have timed out to deliver President Obama a crushing defeat right before the 2012 election. Instead, the Supreme Court upheld the law and President Obama handily won reelection, leaving the GOP angrier than they were before, if this was even possible. So now the GOP has tried to shut down the whole government in an attempt to defund the program, and they’ve failed even at that. So what do they have left to do now? Carp about the program, trot out any example of problems with it, and generally grouse about every detail that they can.
I don’t know that there’s a “secret plan” at work here, but there’s definitely a GOP strategy being employed. It’s no secret that they hate this President, and it’s no secret that they will do whatever they can to undermine him. But for all their wishful thinking, he’s going to be in office for the next three years and there’s really nothing they can do about that. Except throw the tantrums we are now regularly seeing on Fox News.
That was the idea of the ACA, Bill. That people would be covered with decent, inexpensive health insurance. Also, how do insurance companies NOT make money by selling their customers crap they don’t need?
E-mail Bill and suggest he get Wendell Potter on the program to explain how the health insurance industry works. Bill seems woefully ignorant or he’s a liar. (probably both)
Read more at http://www.newshounds.us/indreader_bill_o_reilly_reveals_obama_s_secret_plan_to_destroy_your_health_insurance_11092013#SxHU4CJbirCjJCqi.99
Also, where was this guy when Bush was getting caught in 50 lies a day? Oh, he was telling us to support our president, and not evne pretend we’re gonna question a word he says? All right then.