If you watched Fox News Sunday yesterday, you probably saw Cade Joiner, introduced merely as a businessman who lost his health insurance plan thanks to the Affordable Care Act ("ObamaCare"). Wallace described Joiner as one of the "folks outside of the Beltway." FoxNews.com titled its video of the discussion similarly. That may be technically true since Joiner is from Atlanta. But what Wallace didn't tell you? Joiner is a Republican operative.
Tommy Christopher, at Mediaite, pointed out what Wallace seems to have deliberately hidden: Joiner is the past President of the Georgia Association of College Republicans, but more recently, he was a campaign fundraising organizer, and then a campaign finance committee co-chair, for the successful reelection bid of Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp (R-GA).
As for Joiner's story about having "called around" and finding "the same policy would cost me almost $500 a month, and I just found that non-acceptable" - well, that's not quite true, either. Christopher notes drily:
Wallace also should have asked Joyner (sic) where he “called around” to find an individual health insurance policy for over $500, when the most expensive policy available in his county of residence costs about $350.00, and there are several plans available for less than he was paying before. It might be tough to get viewers to sympathize with a Republican fundraising heavyweight whose insurance premiums went up, but nearly impossible if they went down.
Joiner is just the latest in a series of fake ObamaCare victims touted by Fox News. Memo to Fox, if you have to deceive to find your "victims," it tends to undercut your message that the Affordable Care Act is really a failure.
First, they’re following the GOP playbook of trying to loudly announce any possible consumers who don’t like the ACA as a way of smearing both it and the Dems for 2014 and 2016. This was Bill O’Reilly’s “sage” advice during the shutdown – let the ACA go into effect (obstructing it at every turn) and then scream about all the problems so that the Dems lose the Senate in the next election, after which the GOP would then immediately repeal the ACA. This seems to be most of what we’ve been seeing on Kelly’s program over the past two weeks without a pause.
And the second idea is the same one the GOP and Fox News have been following since they lost the 2012 election: A massive temper tantrum.
