Saturday, March 22, 2014

When Republican positions are indefensible, they resort to lies.

Another debunked Obamacare horror story: Republican attack ad cites phony job loss numbers (Click here to read more)

Rss@dailykos.com (joan Mccarter)
Tuesday, March 18, 2014, 5:13 pm
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This ad will sound awfully familiar to you, if you've been following the saga of debunked Obamacare ads. This isn't from the Koch brothers, for once, at least not directly. It's from the Republican Governors Association. The RGA says this about the ad: "Gregg Hughes, a South Carolina small business owner whose company ObamaCare has cost jobs."
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Hughes doesn't actually say in the ad how Obamacare has cost jobs for his company. He says that he received notice of a rate increase in insurance premiums. And we all know that no insurance company ever raised rates before Obamacare became law, right?
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But the egregiously false claim that the RGA makes is the one showing in that screen shot in the video above: "34,000 jobs could be lost" because of the law. If this is sounding vaguely familiar to you, it's because we've debunked that claim already, previously over Medicaid expansion. But it's the same lie.
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    At least, that's according to a study that the South Carolina Hospital Association conducted. It concluded that expansion "would generate approximately $11.2 billion between 2014 and 2020," and "South Carolina's total annual economic impact of the increase in federal funding due to the Medicaid expansion will be approximately $1.5 billion in labor income, $3.3 billion in state economic activity while generating nearly 44,000 new jobs in the state by 2020." The net gain for the state until 2020, the study says: "a surplus of approximately $9 million."
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For those keeping score, that's one unsubstantiated claim about the impact of Obamacare on one small business and an already debunked claim about the impact of the law for the whole state of South Carolina.

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