Source: Investor's Business Daily
Over at Slate, Timothy Noah swallowed hook, line and sinker the report issued yesterday by the Department of Health and Human Services that 129 million Americans with pre-existing conditions are at risk of being denied coverage if ObamaCare is repealed.
Noah writes, "I see one-half of a nation getting screwed one way or another simply because it enjoys less than perfect health. Obamacare will make this group's lives substantially better starting in 2014." That should get a nice pat on the head from Kathleen Sebelius. Maybe she'll even send him some Christmas meat!
As Ed Haislmaier of the conservative Heritage Foundation pointed out to IBD yesterday, most of the U.S. population is already protected from pre-existing condition exclusions under a federal law known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. Haislmaier follows up with his own blog post today, and adds this pertinent question: "…if the report's assertion that over 100 million Americans with preexisting medical conditions risk being denied coverage if Obamacare is repealed, then why weren't 100 million American's with preexisting medical conditions denied coverage, say, five years ago, before Obamacare was enacted?"
He also points to this blog post by John Goodman of the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis that wonders why, if the problem of pre-existing conditions is so big, did only 8,000 people sign up for ObamaCare's high-risk pool? Goodman's answer is that ObamaCare's backers exaggerated the problem from the start.
Over at the libertarian Cato Institute, Michael Cannon notes that an HHS survey in 2001 found that only 1% of Americans had ever been denied coverage. A report from the early 1990s by the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research yielded a similar finding.
At the end of his Slate piece, Noah fantasizes: "Maybe not all these 129 million voted in the 2010 election. Maybe some of them are even Republicans. But if the GOP succeeds in denying them health reform this year, I would guess that they'll probably vote in 2012."
Perhaps if Noah did some research he might be a bit less credulous regarding the propaganda emitted by the Obama administration.