Conservative catch phrase " what everybody knows"

I have been struck by how often Trump supporters I encounter use the phrase "everybody knows" to assert statements which are factually false, often obtained from fake new sources.

This has been especially true about the ACA, aka Obamacare. They insist, in particular, that everyone knows Obamacare is collapsing and that everyone is experiencing unaffordable, catastrophic increases in premiums with high deductibles.  They
also assert that no insurers are remaining in the market, that they have left or are in the process of leaving.

Reality is that while there are problems for some of those on the Obamacare plans, that is mor anecdotal than widespread, and varies widely by geography.

Insurance companies have pretty universally been reaping unprecedented profits. Where a problem exists it can substantially be tracked back to 2015 legislation by Republicans that gutted guarantees to make good on losses to insurers.

Paul Ryan has  said he wants Americans to have "patient centered care'"  not government centered care.  Yet what the Congress Republicans have proposed takes care away from Americans, and can only accurately be described as  corporate profit care, without any genuin concern for patients at all.

If you want to keep your "Market Driven" failure of a healthcare system... well, you lose.

A story in the LA Times today about a study by Rand Research says the enrolment figures for the Affordable Care Act (which conservative frothers know only as Obamacare), will likely be near or even above 9.5 million people by the enrolment deadline (today).  Meaning, of the perhaps 17 million uninsured workers, and 47 million Americans in total without insurance, the ACA will have found a way to cover half of the workers and about 1/5 of all, and that's SO FAR.  Also, it will have ended the practices of pre-existing exclusions and limitations, something tried in 1996 but around which insurance companies found loopholes.

Obamacare has led to health coverage for millions more people

At least 9.5 million previously uninsured people have gotten health insurance since Obamacare started, surveys and reports show.

WASHINGTON — President Obama's healthcare law, despite a rocky rollout and determined opposition from critics, already has spurred the largest expansion in health coverage in America in half a century, national surveys and enrollment data show.

As the law's initial enrollment period closes, at least 9.5 million previously uninsured people have gained coverage. Some have done so through marketplaces created by the law, some through other private insurance and others through Medicaid, which has expanded under the law in about half the states.

The tally draws from a review of state and federal enrollment reports, surveys and interviews with insurance executives and government officials nationwide.

The Affordable Care Act still faces major challenges, particularly the risk of premium hikes next year that could drive away newly insured customers. But the increased coverage so far amounts to substantial progress toward one of the law's principal goals and is the most significant expansion since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.

The millions of newly insured also create a politically important constituency that may complicate any future Republican repeal efforts.

This also means it will be 2.5 million MORE than the Obama Administration set as an estimate last summer, and about a BAGILLION times more than the nay-saying, just say NO to everything crowd of Republicans said would get enrolled last fall after the initial roll-out had capacity/throughput issues (some of which were directly attributable programming problems which were the outgrowth of the intential lack of funding Republicans created for the program from 2010 on - thereby creating the very failures they pointed out).

On an even funner and funnier side, the number of Americans who may have had their insurance dropped NOT BY THE ADMINISTRATION BUT BY COMPANIES WHO CHOSE TO NOT REPLACE THE PLAN WITH ONE THAT DIDN'T EXCLUDE PRE-EX CONDITIONS, will not be "Millions of Americans" but more likely, "hundreds of thousands", or maybe a 10:1 ratio of those who got insurance vs. those who no longer have piece of sh*T plans offered by lowball companies. And let's be clear about one thing, when Obama said, "If you like your healthplan, you can keep it" he meant the Administration wasn't going to take anything from you.  It/he can't keep unscrupulous companies from doing unscrupulous things.

Even so, that number was (gasp!) greatly exagerated and much poo was flung by those who don't get that spending 26% of our national economy is a recipe for economic stagnation and decline - and it was flung about these "poor Americans" who would lose their craptastical insurance.  Well it seems, not so much.

In the end, what this shows is, America and Americans needed a better choice than the rip-you-off because you will pay anything to save your loved-ones "market driven" solution the US insurance companies and health care providers devised over the past 40 years.  This is a first step, and unlike all of the negative pronouncements, it appears to not only have met, but far exceeded (to the tune of exceeding it by 30%) expectations.  Show me a private company that fought tooth and nail against multi-billion dollar lobbying to launch a nationwide product using multiple vendors, which met and exceeded expectations by 30%.  There are a few, but damned few.  What it shows is that collectively, using economies of scale, the same economies large companies use, we can, if we try, do great and even very good things, despite the hate-mongers. 

So, much like Ronnie RayGun was wrong about Medicare leading the US down the road to becoming a communist nation - go read, he said that very thing, those of you who said the system would fail and it would greatly harm the US, you were wrong. You lose.  The final pilar of a socially concience state has had it's foundation set.  The funny thing is, someday, you'll understand that it was the BEST thing that could happen.  We have to get our businesses out of the business of needing to feed an unending amount of cash into a broken healthcare system if we are to compete on a global stage.  The current model was bankrupting us FAR more than Washington DC ever could.  Someday you may understand it, but I'll not hold my breath.  If I do, though, at least I know I'll not have any charges related to my subsequent treatement denied payment because I held my breath once when I was six.  Maybe you should start holding your breath until they repeal it - and then you too can see how nice it is not to have to worry about whether your insurance is going to screw you, again.

Conservatives, by definition, believe things that are not true

Tip of the hat to Addicting Info for this.

According to right wing nut case Jim Garrow,
the Obamacare guillotine has now been legalized and will be used
to behead Christians and enforce Sharia Law.

LISTEN: Right Wing Nut Says Obamacare Legalizes Execution By Guillotine

Right-wing conspiracy theorist, Jim Garrow, recently made an appearance on The Rundown Live, where he told listeners that the president just added legal guillotine beheadings to the ‘Obamacare list.’

“What happened now, just recently? We now have a part of Obamacare where we now have legalized execution by guillotine. Did you see the list? It’s been added to the list.” (Source)

So Obamacare is a Muslim plot to behead Christians?

Did you see the list? Of course you didn’t see it. That’s because no such list exists.
Garrow is not known for his obsession with those little things called ‘facts, though.’ The author of a highly questionable book about Chinese baby smuggling, Garrow is a regular contributor to websites like Infowars and Prison Planet. He’s also a frequent guest on right wing radio and television shows like The Rundown Live and World Net Daily TV.

“If Obama is a Muslim,”

Garrow continued, during his recent appearance on The Rundown Live,

“if the Muslims when they dominate Christians, if what they do is kill them by taking off their heads, decapitation by the sword, this is just another sword, it’s another way, it’s another mollification of Muslims, of Islam, it’s another lining up, paralleling what’s right and able to be done in America, legally, with what the Muslims do. This is dhimmitude, submission, submission to Islam and the traditions of Islam. Done by that bunch of wackos, that bunch of crazies, traitors in the White House led by Mr. Obama.”

We've heard a lot of lies, some more subtle, others just so off-the-wall that it beggars credibility that there are conservatives who believe such nonsense.

This falls into the latter, but the sad reality is that this is just the further right wing of modern conservatives on the conservative spectrum.  The more teabaggy, the more religious right extremist, the cray-cray-crazier the things they sincerely believe.  Worse, because they are sincere in their belief, they feel they deserve deep respect and even special treatment.

There is no longer a moderate and serious core to conservatism that can significantly reprimand or reject the cray-cray-crazy extremists, the way that William F. Buckley did to the John Birchers and other mouth-foaming wackos back in the mid 20th century.  The very essence of a rational political party has been hijacked; the lunatics are in control of the asylum.

The Addicting Info piece caught my attention, not only because it was so preposterous, but because I spent a few hours I will never get back again a few years ago, researching the man who made the cray-cray claim over some OTHER nut job statements.  Even for those on the right who have enough rational capacity left in their heads to be skeptical of claims like this, it is useful to those in power on the right because it contributes to the emotional response that Obamacare is bad, an emotional response on which they rely. 

It was a boast of Dubya that he made decisions based on his gut - and his gut was consistently wrong.  That alternative to factual thinking characterizes the modern right, and has increasingly done so since the days of Ronald Reagan.

The other aspect of the Addicting Info piece that caught my attention was that this appeared in the radical right wing media.  We have seen that pattern over and over, where propaganda has pride of place over fact, from commercial right wing radio, like Salem Broadcasting, which I encountered when researching the Affinity Scam posts where right wing radio gave credibility as well as made money by selling their air time to scam artists who prey on the radical right, in the case we wrote about here, primarily on the religious right. The scammers are doing stretches in the federal pen; those on the right who helped them to rip off other conservatives however are still getting cushy MN GOP patronage jobs.

This guillotine garbage was also broadcast on the radical right media, and came from a right wing alternate media broadcaster next door in Wisconsin, which broadcasts not just nationally, but internationally, on an internet Christian network, the Truth Broadcasting Network.

Sadly, besides the embrace of magical and emotional thinking, the belief in things that are not true, the modern conservative bubble people are not just all-too-willing to promote pure unadulterated shit as fact, they are eager to exploit their more gullible followers, to take not only their time but to try to separate them from their money.  They are a greedy and shamefully exploitative group of people who live by terrorizing and ripping off their own gullible, ignorant and very sincere base.

Shame on the Killers, Shame on the Radical Right

They are killers, even when the people who will die are their own children, or the children of friends and family members.

These people are the epitome of hate, of greed, of lust for power, of inhumanity and lack of compassion and care for others.  They are the exemplars of immorality, unethical behavior, and evil. They have dedicated themselves to a culture of death and inequality, of illness and bad government, of lies for cash and deception of their own followers for profit.

If they do not kill directly, they do directly contribute to many, many deaths and to much suffering.

And when those people die, instead of owning what they did, they will try to shift the blame to others, because these are NOT the people who actually take responsibility or their actions.  They are the people who give lip service to personal accountability, while exercising a double standard in demanding it from others. 

Satire Illumines our Public Discourse -- and it's more fun

I'm laughing at the 'eat broccoli' government over-reach argument. Who should know more about government overreach than the chronically over-reaching Republicans?

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