Almalieque wrote:
Gbaji wrote:
I'm sorry. I thought it was understood that I was talking about being "lied to in order to get them to support a position on the ACA". And guess what? The overwhelming majority of people who oppose the ACA do not do so for the reasons you mentioned. Hence: Irrelevant.
You have no idea on how many people believe the GOP rhetoric on the ACA. So, you admit that the GOP lied on those two statements?
The GOP? No. I'll ask again for you to show me actual elected members of the national Republican party who said those two things. Not some guy on the radio. Not some blogger somewhere. Actual elected members of the GOP. Cause if you're going to say that the GOP lied to people, it has to start with showing the actual GOP doing this. Then, we can start looking at how significant such a claim may or may not have been in terms of convincing people to oppose the ACA.
I know this may be shocking to you, but I do happen to know a lot of conservatives. And while I'm not discounting the possible existence of nutter on "my side" of the political aisle, I've never heard someone come up to me in a conversation and say "OMG! We've got to stop Obamacare or we'll all be slaves or dead!". What I do hear is people talking about how free markets are better at providing health care than government bureaucracies and how prices will likely go up and quality down under Obamacare, and how mandates are a bad idea because they crowd out competition and how there are better ways to reform our health care than that proposed in Obamacare.
Do you understand the concept of a straw man? Because that's what you're arguing here.
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Think about it. If they are willing to lie about something so obviously wrong, is it not reasonable to believe that they lied about more subtle things?
It's so obviously wrong should be your starting point to figuring out why what you're trying to argue is wrong.
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1. You have the commercials where your doctor is replaced with Uncle Sam. The GOP has argued that ACA does not allow individuals to keep or choose their own doctor, but will be given a low waged, beginner government cheese eating doctor, like a defense attorney. That is a bold face lie that is believed, because it's believable.
Or, we can say that Obama (you know, an actual elected member of the Democratic party) repeated over and over that "Under the ACA, if you want to keep your existing health care, you can" was a lie. See how that works? Actual statement by actual elected representative of a party (head of said party even!) that is not true. Which is the point of the ad.
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2. They have been arguing that the ACA should be delayed a year for the people because businesses have been given the option and everyone should be treated the same. That's misleading, because a business != a person, nor do the rules apply the same way. EVERY PERSON in that business is still under the mandate, therefore EVERY PERSON is treated equally.
Um... Except that every person working for certain businesses (and the government) are exempted. So if we're to treat everyone the same, isn't it wrong to treat some people one way and some another? For example: Since I work for a private non-union company and receive high quality health coverage, I'm required to treat that coverage as income under Obamacare (so I pay income taxes on it now). But if I were employed by the government, or worked for a union, even if my pay and coverage were otherwise identical, I would not.
Is that fair? Is that treating every person the same? No. It's not.
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3. The GOP has been arguing that they have been compromising and it's the President who is not willing to discuss anything. That's a lie, because a compromise doesn't consist of giving up the most prized possession. Compromising would be allowing ACA to go forward, but to defund food stamps (already happened) along with other government programs.
Then offer something. How much is funding Obamacare worth to the Democrats? They haven't offered anything, or even made an attempt to balance the budget (or come close to balancing it) in 4 years. I keep saying this, but it bears repeating: This is not just about Obamcare.
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4. Probably the biggest lie of them all. The GOP has argued that this program will only hurt the people, when in fact, they are just afraid of the "47%" liking it. This will carry on to the 2014/2016 elections.
And yet another strawman. When you inject words like "only", you create an absolute position which is easy to attack. So if just one person isn't hurt, the GOP is wrong? That's kinda ridiculous, right? How about the more reasonable position that on balance more people will be harmed by the passage of Obamacare than will be helped? Obviously, and as I've pointed out repeatedly, there will be some small percentage of people who will see benefits from Obamacare. But it wont be anywhere near 47%. It can't be mathematically for the program to even come close to solvency. And the more it fails to do so, the more costs will end out being lumped on the population down the line to pay for the difference (ultimately meaning that whatever benefits people gain today will be short lived).
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ACA is built to help specifically that small percentage.
But not sold to the majority on that though. An honest approach would be Obama standing at podium and saying that since a small percentage of Americans fall through the cracks between public and private care (around 20 million or so?), we should all pay a bit more for our health insurance in order to make sure they're covered. But he didn't do that. He said that existing care would stay the same, and existing costs would stay the same for most Americans, with only the rich folks making up the difference (paying their fair share, right?).
He intentionally made it seem like like only "the rich" would see any increase in costs from this. Remember the whole rhetoric about how only people making X dollars or more would see their taxes increase? Those statements were made in direct response to conservatives arguing that taxes would have to go up to pay for Obamacare. And here's the funny bit (and the really big lie). How they got around this statement was that when the Dems were selling Obamacare, they labeled all the increases costs as "fees and fines", not taxes. Thus, they could say that taxes would not increase (a lie of omission). Of course, the GOP pointed this out and were roundly attacked for mislabeling those things as "taxes". So the conservatives sued over this, arguing that the use of such fines and fees violated the constitutional authority of congress under the commerce act. Ironically, the Supreme Court agreed, but instead of striking down the law, they simply labeled the fines and fees at "taxes" and called it constitutional.
So what we have here is a huge lie to the American people. Their taxes would not go up because what they were don't wasn't called a tax. But once it was passed (and the support of the people was no longer required), they were more than happy to argue those same fines/fees that were not called a tax when they needed to lie to the people to get support actually were taxes in order to make the whole thing constitutional.
That's a lie. That's a huge lie. And it was one of the basic arguments used to get people on board with the ACA.
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This goes back to the GOP rhetoric of having Uncle Sam doing being your doctor. Even if a person is mislead about how much they will have to pay for insurance, they will not know unless they go through the process. Every person's situation is different, so you can't just do simple math without the other health factors. So, supporting it under the belief that they think that they might have lower costs isn't false support because someone else is benefiting. It's only false support if the individual only support things that support themselves.
Uh... We can still calculate statistical effects of the law on various economic ranges of people within our workforce. And statistically, most people will see their health costs rise significantly. Actually, most people already have. But I suspect that's where the next layer of lie will occur. Since the health providers have already been raising their prices for the last couple years in preparation for Obamacare, I'm sure that folks on the left will take prices on the day before it "officially" started and say "see! Prices didn't go up!". But if you look at price increases industry wide since the law was passed, it's a whole different story.
The sheer volume of deception and outright lies used to push the ACA is pretty staggering if you stop and think about it. What's amazing to me is how many people just refuse to admit it.