Fox’s Your World may have taken fake ObamaCare reporting to new heights - or lows - when it discussed the results of a recent Bankrate.com poll of people without health insurance. The poll that found 56% of uninsured adults plan to get health insurance, while 34% plan to continue being uninsured, and the other 10% either don’t know or refused to answer. Neil Cavuto spun it as though the numbers were reversed. And that was just the beginning of the selective editing of facts.
Cavuto said, “We’ve upended our entire health care system to help the uninsured, that’s what this is all about. Well guess what? Many still don’t want it. …We did all of this discombobulating for apparently nothing because the uninsured are not signing up.”
Meanwhile, he ignored last week’s results of a Gallup poll which found the number of uninsured dropped from 17.1% at the end of 2013 to 15.9%, the lowest since 2008.
Another thing Cavuto ignored was the anti-ObamaCare activist resumé of his guest, ophthalmologist Jane Hughes. She was introduced merely as a doctor who has been “warning about problems with the law from the very start.” Warning with false scare tactics, that is.
Hughes said, “Well, the uninsured evidently aren’t signing up, and according to Health and Human Services and Medicare and Medicaid services, they aren’t even keeping track of who had insurance and who didn’t have insurance when they are signing up.”
“…What did we do this for?” Cavuto asked.
Dr. Manny Alvarez, a Fox News contributor, ratcheted up the rhetoric. “We did it for nothing. We did it to confuse America. We did it to create a false tax. We did it to create an environment of punitive damages to people that don’t follow what the federal government tells them to do.” He said health care now is “a hundred times worse, or a trillion times worse.”
Hughes said, “It’s absolutely not been worth the hassle, and I know why we did all of this. This was a sociopolitical agenda to take over one sixth of the private sector economy using my profession, medicine, to do it. …Six million Americans have been bumped off their insurance plans because of Obamacare, and if you are going to believe the White House, 4.2 million have signed up. So for my math, that means if we had a big neon sign over HealthCare.gov, it would be minus 1.8 million now enrolled, that’s hardly a success story.”
Apparently 56% planning to get covered doesn’t count. Or does Fox think 34% is more than 56%?
Also not discussed was the role of the 24 states which refused to expand Medicaid. The biggest reason given in the Bankrate poll for not wanting to get coverage was cost. Bankrate’s own expert estimated that a third of those who plan to remain uninsured are from those states.
Furthermore, Bankrate reported, “Fewer than a third (30 percent) of the uninsured realize that federal tax credits available through the new Obamacare health exchanges can make health insurance affordable to lower-income individuals and families.”
Not surprisingly, that wasn't mentioned, either.