Before the Affordable Care Act was passed with bipartisan support, the swelling numbers of Americans dying because they lacked healthcare or financially destroyed because of medical bills  was alarming.

These are Americans: with no insurance, unemployed with no healthcare, denied coverage because of 'pre-existing condition,' insurance companies cancelling coverage because of expensive conditions, insurance company abuse, grossly overpaid healthcare admionistrators and much else.

We've all heard the horror stories and unlike my Tea Bagger friends who want to dismiss this issue with 'I have my health insurance. Too bad for you!' we have an obligation to assure that all Americans are provided with the same benefits we enjoy.

The U.S. is the only industrialized nation failing to provide universal coverage.

How pathetic! Who would deny Americans healthcare?

It's time to eliminate the extremists and rid America of this Koch-Funded scourge!


September 23, 2013, 1:09 pm

Sabotaging Health Care, One Lie at a Time

By JULIET LAPIDOS

A Koch-brothers funded conservative group, Generation Opportunity, is out with a wildly misleading, pernicious set of ads aimed at sabotaging the Affordable Care Act by discouraging young people from signing up for health insurance exchanges.

One targets young men, the other young women. In the “for him” version, a young man tells his doctor that he saw an ad for the Affordable Care Act and “figured, why not?” The doctor tells him to take his pants off, “hop up here, lay down and bend your knees to your chest.” He leaves the room.

Then a man wearing an Uncle Sam mask snaps on a blue glove. As if the message weren’t perfectly clear, the ad states: “Don’t let government play doctor.”

The “for her” version is much the same, except in that case Uncle Sam’s performing a gynecological exam.

The ads are as offensive as they are derivative.

During the 2012 campaign, the reproductive rights site Lady Parts Justice released a web video attacking laws requiring women to undergo medically unnecessary ultrasounds before receiving abortions. In that spot, a woman with her feet in stirrups explains that she wants an abortion because she’s “just not emotionally or financially ready to have kids right now.” The doctor, sitting between her legs, responds, “OK, well, just so you know, the law says that before I can do that, I need to do some things to you that you need to pay extra for. You know, just some things that will help you better understand what it is you really want.” These “things” include inserting a camera into her vagina and looking at pictures of what’s inside her uterus.

But that video made sense—states actually did pass laws interfering with the doctor-patient relationship—whereas the Generation Opportunity ads perpetuate outright lies. Young people who sign up for exchanges won’t be getting access to government-run healthcare (if only they were!), but to privately run insurance. Nor does the A.C.A. force doctors to ask patients about their sex lives or perform unwanted exams—as Politifact explained recently. Under the A.C.A., government doesn’t “play doctor,” it merely enables access to doctors who then decide, using their professional judgment, the best course of action.

Signing up for an exchange isn’t an act of political (or sexual) submission. It’s just a way to get insurance if you don’t have a job or your employer doesn’t provide it. The Generation Opportunity crowd surely knows that and obviously doesn’t care because its priority now, as ever, is bringing down President Obama’s signature domestic accomplishment. The group also doesn’t care about the possibility that some number of young people, scared by its ads, will forgo access to affordable care, get sick, and go bankrupt paying their medical bills.

http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/sabotaging-health-care-one-lie-at-a-time/?hp&_r=0