I
happened to turn on the Hannity show on Fox News last Friday evening.
“Average Americans are feeling the pain of Obamacare and the healthcare
overhaul train wreck,” Hannity announced, “and six of them are here
tonight to tell us their stories.” Three married couples were neatly
arranged in his studio, the wives seated and the men standing behind
them, like game show contestants.
As Hannity called on each of
them, the guests recounted their “Obamacare” horror stories: canceled
policies, premium hikes, restrictions on the freedom to see a doctor of
their choice, financial burdens upon their small businesses and so on.
“These are the stories that the media refuses to cover,” Hannity interjected.
But
none of it smelled right to me. Nothing these folks were saying jibed
with the basic facts of the Affordable Care Act as I understand them. I
understand them fairly well; I have worked as a senior adviser to a
governor and helped him deal with the new federal rules.
I decided to hit the pavement. I tracked down Hannity’s guests, one by one, and did my own telephone interviews with them.
First
I spoke with Paul Cox of Leicester, N.C. He and his wife Michelle had
lamented to Hannity that because of Obamacare, they can’t grow their
construction business and they have kept their employees below a certain
number of hours, so that they are part-timers.
Obamacare has no
effect on businesses with 49 employees or less. But in our brief
conversation on the phone, Paul revealed that he has only four
employees. Why the cutback on his workforce? “Well,” he said, “I haven’t
been forced to do so, it’s just that I’ve chosen to do so. I have to
deal with increased costs.” What costs? And how, I asked him, is any of
it due to Obamacare? There was a long pause, after which he said he’d
call me back. He never did.
There is only one Obamacare
requirement that applies to a company of this size: workers must be
notified of the existence of the “
healthcare.gov” website, the insurance exchange. That’s all.
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Next
I called Allison Denijs. She’d told Hannity that she pays over $13,000
a year in premiums. Like the other guests, she said she had recently
gotten a letter from Blue Cross saying that her policy was being
terminated and a new, ACA-compliant policy would take its place. She
says this shows that Obama lied when he promised Americans that we could
keep our existing policies.
Allison’s husband left his job a few
years ago, one with benefits at a big company, to start his own
business. Since then they’ve been buying insurance on the open market,
and are now paying around $1,100 a month for a policy with a $2,500
deductible per family member, with hefty annual premium hikes. One of
their two children is not covered under the policy. She has a
preexisting condition that would require purchasing additional coverage
for $800 a month, which would bring the family’s grand total to $19,000 a
year.
I asked Allison if she’d shopped on the exchange, to see
what a plan might cost under the new law. She said she hadn’t done so
because she’d heard the website was not working. Would she try it out
when it’s up and running? Perhaps, she said. She told me she has long
opposed Obamacare, and that the president should have focused on tort
reform as a solution to bringing down the price of healthcare.
I
tried an experiment and shopped on the exchange for Allison and Kurt.
Assuming they don’t smoke and have a household income too high to be
eligible for subsidies, I found that they would be able to get a plan
for around $7,600, which would include coverage for their uninsured
daughter. This would be about a 60 percent reduction from what they
would have to pay on the pre-Obamacare market.
Allison also told
me that the letter she received from Blue Cross said that in addition to
the policy change for ACA compliance, in the new policy her physician
network size might be reduced. That’s something insurance companies do
to save money, with or without Obamacare on the horizon, just as they
raise premiums with or without Obamacare coming.
If Allison’s
choice of doctor was denied her through Obamacare then, yes, she could
have a claim that Obamacare has hurt her. But she’d also have thousands
of dollars in her pocket that she didn’t have before.
Finally, I
called Robbie and Tina Robison from Franklin, Tenn. Robbie is
self-employed as a Christian youth motivational speaker. (You can see
his work
here.) On
Hannity, the couple said that they, too, were recently notified that
their Blue Cross policy would be expiring for lack of ACA compliance.
They told Hannity that the replacement plans Blue Cross was offering
would come with a rate increase of 50 percent or even 75 percent, and
that the new offerings would contain all sorts of benefits they don’t
need, like maternity care, pediatric care, prenatal care and so forth.
Their kids are grown and moved out, so why should they be forced to pay
extra for a health plan with superfluous features?
When I spoke
to Robbie, he said he and Tina have been paying a little over $800 a
month for their plan, about $10,000 a year. And the ACA-compliant policy
will cost 50-75 percent more? They said this information was related to
them by their insurance agent.
Had they shopped on the exchange
yet, I asked? No, Tina said, nor would they. They oppose Obamacare and
want nothing to do with it. Fair enough, but they should know that I
found a plan for them for, at most, $3,700 a year, a 63 percent less
than their current bill. It might cover things that they don’t need,
but so does every insurance policy.
It’s true that we don’t know
for sure whether certain ills conservatives have warned about will occur
once Obamacare is fully enacted. For example, will we truly have the
same freedom to choose a physician that we have now? Will a surplus of
insured patients require a scaling back (or “rationing,” as some call
it) of provided healthcare services? Will doctors be able to spend as
much time with patients? These are all valid, unanswered questions. The
problem is that people like Sean Hannity have decided to answer them
now, without evidence. Or worse, with fake evidence.
I don’t doubt that these six individuals
believe
that Obamacare is a disaster; but none of them had even visited the
insurance exchange. And some of them appear to have taken actions (Paul
Cox, for example) based on a general pessimistic belief about Obamacare.
He’s certainly entitled to do so, but Hannity is not entitled to point
to Paul’s behavior as an “Obamacare train wreck story” and maintain any
credibility that he might have as a journalist.
Strangely, the
recent shutdown was based almost entirely on a small percentage of
Congress’s belief that Obamacare, as Ted Cruz puts it, “is destroying
America.” Cruz has rarely given us an example of what he’s talking
about. That’s because the best he can do is what Hannity did—exploit
people’s ignorance and falsely point to imaginary boogeymen.
Great article. Stern fact-checked Hannity by personally contacting
three couples Hannity claimed had been harmed by Obamacare, and finding
out how baseless those claims were. 
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