The shady left-wing group “Save My Care” is launching an ad blitz designed to punish House Republicans who voted last week to pass the GOP’s health care bill, the American Health Care Act (AHCA).
Save My Care, a coalition of pro-Obamacare advocacy groups, is launching a TV ad buy in excess of $500,000 to target five congressional districts represented by Republicans who supported the AHCA. The ads target Reps. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), Bruce Poliquin (R-Maine), Don Young (R-Alaska), Mark Amodei (R-Nev.), and Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.), Politico reported.
Perhaps tellingly, the ad never mentions President Barack Obama’s disastrous health care law, which former President Bill Clinton said “doesn’t make any sense.” Clinton had a point. Under Obamacare, health insurance premiums spiked. Important promises, like “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” were broken.
President Obama came out of retirement in March to insist that his health care reform wasn’t a “job-killer.” Rather than addressing the law’s insurance mandates involving full-time workers, Obama took credit for the overall expansion in the job market, which can be attributed to many different causes, including the growth of oil jobs due to hydraulic fracturing.
In any case, Save My Care is out to protect Obamacare, even if Obama’s health legacy is too toxic to mention by name. The ad accuses Republicans of repealing “health care” and supporting a “disastrous” bill opposed by the American Medical Association, the AARP, and the American Cancer Society.
“McSally voted to raise your costs and cut coverage for millions, to let insurance companies deny affordable coverage for cancer treatment and maternity care, and charge 5 times more for people over 50,” a narrator declares in the ad, directed against the Arizona congresswoman. The video features images of distressed patients and doctors, and — for added effect — an infant wearing an oxygen mask.
“McSally voted yes even though the bill makes coverage completely unaffordable to people with pre-existing conditions,” the ad declares. “Congresswoman McSally, how could you do this to us?”
In addition to the five districts targeted by television ads, a digital version of the ads will attack an additional 19 Republican congressmen. Save My Care does not identify which “groups” are part of the organization’s effort to protect Obamacare, perhaps in order to shield those organizations from any backlash over their support for the disastrous law.
While the AHCA did pass the House last week, it is unlikely to succeed in the Senate without substantial alterations. Democrats have alleged that the bill undermines Obamacare’s guarantees of access to insurance coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, a charge Republicans flatly deny.
The GOP bill does permit states to waive Obamacare’s ban on insurance companies charging higher premiums to sick patients, as well as the law’s mandatory minimum benefits. But even when states choose to opt out, they will be required to set up risk pools to minimize increased costs for vulnerable people, under the AHCA.
Some liberals have gone so far as to compare the Republican bill to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a Hulu series that presents a misogynistic dystopia, on the grounds that the AHCA would allow insurance companies to consider domestic abuse, past pregnancies, and traumatizing rapes to be “pre-existing conditions” and to deny insurance coverage to victimized women because of these issues. This is blatantly false, as all but six states have laws specifically forbidding such actions.
Liberals now seem to be championing Obamacare, the very issue Republicans campaigned against for years — and which arguably led them to take the House, Senate, and presidency. Some pundits, like The New York Times‘ Paul Krugman, have already started rewriting history, painting Obamacare in a positive light in order to demonize Republicans.
It is up to the American people to remember why Obamacare should be repealed, and to give an alternative a chance. With any luck, the problems with the AHCA will get worked out in the Senate, and as Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price reworks the federal health care bureaucracy. The debate over the Republican plan continues, but Democrats are already trying to silence it in order to preserve Obamacare.
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