My Thursday column and a whopper Republican lie:
Here’s a scandal no one’s really talking about in the press or elsewhere for that matter. Republican members of Congress, as well as conservatives across the internet, are engaged in a group lie about the cost of Obamacare. Correction — it’s either a group lie or group stupidity or perhaps a mixture of both. I prefer to think that it’s a deliberate deception about the healthcare law because the alternative explanation is arguably more frightening: an array of prominent conservatives are simply too dumb to read a chart or grasp the basic difference between “gross” costs and “net” costs. It’s economics and finance 101, and considering how they fancy themselves the party of money — the free market party — the distinction between gross and net ought to be common knowledge.
On Tuesday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released it’s quarterly report on the cost of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — Obamacare. The upshot is that the 10-year net cost of the program has risen by $40 billion from estimates in the February report. There are several reasons why, but I won’t bore you with the wonky details. Suffice to say, there’s nothing even remotely worrisome about the report or the status of Obamacare. Actually, the biggest news on this front is that the CBO has refused any further scoring for the Republican effort to repeal the law. Good for the CBO. It’s about damn time.
Meanwhile, however, Republicans across the board freaked out about the CBO report, claiming that the cost of Obamacare has doubled. [continue reading here]