Two nights ago, Megyn Kelly took the second of her two swipes at Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a feisty Democrat who had called out Fox News’ bias and BS over ObamaCare the night before. Just as she had on The O’Reilly Factor in the previous hour, Kelly’s comments were made without benefit of Emanuel’s ability to respond. But in this instance, Kelly took it a step further. She read into Emanuel’s statements “proof” that President Obama had come up with some kind of covert plan to make people lose their insurance in order to move them to the ObamaCare exchanges. And then she reiterated her suggestions that President Obama had committed a crime.

Instead of further discussing the matter with Emanuel, Kelly hosted Avik Roy, who heads the right-wing, Koch-funded think tank, Manhattan Institute. Another example of Fox News fairness and balance, Kelly File edition.

Before bringing on Roy, Kelly revisited her new-found obsession with the uninsured (discovered just in time to fall in with Republicans and bash the Affordable Care Act) and said:

The question remains now, about whether seeing those millions of people kicked off of their plans, as we saw in the individual insurance market now, and sending them over to the government exchanges instead was actually (the Obama administration’s) plan right from the beginning, contrary to the president’s explicit promises. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel admitted as much to me last night, listen.

She then played a clip in which Emanuel refuted Kelly’s claim that the few people who have signed up so far for the exchanges are way too few to arrive at the 7 million “needed to make ObamaCare work”:

Emanuel: 7 million includes the people who were expected from the individual market to come on as well. …

Kelly: Are you admitting then, that it was foreseen that the individual insurance market would, essentially, collapse and that that was a key facet of ObamaCare working?

Emanuel: It’s not a matter of foreseeing. The insurance companies always cancel policies.

(cut)

Kelly: Why didn’t you foresee that? And why didn’t you plan against it?

Emanuel: Because we were offering them a better platform to buy insurance, called “the exchange.”

“And there you have it,” Kelly now announced, a Cheshire Cat grin on her face.

Emanuel didn’t say what Kelly claimed he said

Had Kelly played Emanuel’s complete answers, the viewers would have heard Emanuel say this in his complete answer about the 7 million:

No, that’s not right, Megyn, you’ve got the numbers wrong. 7 million includes the people who were expected from the individual market to come on as well, so it’s not just 7 million and the number from the individual market. That’s the first point. The second point is, you have to remember, in the individual market, before ObamaCare, the insurance companies were canceling people all the time. That’s one of the reasons we wanted the exchanges to work. And I agree with you, without the exchange working, this cancellation policy is worrisome. It was worrisome before ObamaCare, it’s worrisome today. The key thing is to get the exchanges working, to get the website working so those people have a place to go where they’ll get better insurance at a more reasonable rate overall.

Emanuel later made the following comments:

…You don’t see that before ObamaCare those kind of cancellations happened all the time. You never covered them. They were very common.

…I’m saying, look, the insurance industry was not forced to cancel anyone. They canceled people before and they see this, the individual market as going away and they’re getting out of it. …I think when you change the market, things change. And businesses make different decisions.

…Whether you could anticipate what business would do is irrelevant. The Affordable Care Act …did not require any single insurance company to cancel a plan. …They decided to do that for business reasons.

So when Emanuel was asked the reason the Obama administration never warned anyone, he answered, “Because we were offering them a better platform to buy insurance, called the exchange. That was the rationale.”

Emanuel never said that anyone foresaw there would be cancellations above and beyond what was already a problem to begin with. Nor did he give a hint that this was some kind of secret plan to surreptitiously make people lose their insurance and go into the exchange. Clearly, Emanuel was saying the Obama administration thought they had a better product to offer those people whose plans would not conform to the requirements of the Affordable Care Act or whose plans were canceled. Or to put it another way, they saw nothing to warn about because they were improving upon what was an existing bad situation.

Maybe if Kelly had allowed Emanuel to finish a thought before frantically interrupting, he could have been more explicit. Instead, Kelly seemed more intent on trapping him into incriminating the Obama administration than in listening to anything he had to say. This segment with Roy and the previous O’Reilly Factor discussion, strengthened my suspicion.

This is far from the first time Kelly has been out for Obama blood over the Affordable Care Act and the heck with the facts. We’ve previously caught her promoting several bogus ObamaCare victims. The extent of the Kelly File's investigation seems to be reading their posts on Facebook. Even though Kelly insists she’s a “news anchor” and not an opinion host.

Kelly is too obsessed with depicting President Obama as a criminal to care about the substance of the Affordable Care Act

Nevertheless, while playing fast and loose with facts herself, she’s peculiarly obsessed – especially for someone who claims not to be an opinion host – with floating suggestions that President Obama should be removed from office for lack of candor in his “you can keep your plan” statements. For example:

• Kelly dismissed ObamaCare’s coverage of the previously uninsured as “old news” yet based an entire segment on the “question” of whether President Obama was in the same league as Richard Nixon, when he was forced to resign, or Bill Clinton, who was impeached.
• In fact, the night before, Kelly spent another segment discussing “hypothetically” whether President Obama deserved to be impeached. “If this were the CEO of an insurance company who had gone out there and done this with the American people, what would you have done as a former federal prosecutor?” she “asked” her guest who just happened to have written a column alleging that President Obama had committed “serial fraud.”
• On another night, Kelly interrupted a guest who was trying to discuss how ObamaCare deals with the 47 million uninsured Americans. She said, “(A)re you telling me that it’s not relevant that he (Obama), that he may have committed a fraud to get this law passed?

“I mean he (Emanuel) admitted it,” Kelly said to Roy, as if she had elicited a confession. “He admitted right there that the 7 million people they need on the exchanges - all along they intended for a number of those people to come over from the individual insurance market.”

Kelly then again pushed her “fraud” (impeachment) conspiracy theory:

Is this all a big fraud? I mean, is this a fraud? Because we had the president, over 40 times saying, “If you like your plan, you can keep it, you can keep it.” And today, he came out and said it was - it turned out to be incorrect. (Her voice filled with mocking scorn), “but I meant it when I said it because I was really talking about Medicaid and Medicare and employer-based coverage.” And the truth appears to be all along they intended on devastating the individual insurance market because they needed the young, healthy people to move over to those state exchanges and to pay more to and to supplement the funding for this law.

I guess Kelly thinks that now that her lawyer days are over, she doesn’t need to bother with evidence any more. I mean, if she doesn’t bother to check her phony ObamaCare victims’ claims, why should she bother with evidence for a conspiracy theory? Or, as I wrote in a previous post, why even think about the bigger picture, namely the benefits of health insurance to the economy as a whole? Or how medical bills are the biggest cause of bankruptcy in the U.S.?  Or how an estimated nearly 10 million people with health insurance will have trouble paying their medical bills this year?

For "news anchor" Kelly, all that pales in importance next to promoting suggestions that President Obama deserves to be impeached or pushed out of office. Whether the facts are with her or not.

Below is Kelly’s discussion with Roy. Underneath that is the entirety of her earlier discussion with Emanuel.