Posted by Sir Four at 11:37am Oct 20 '13If Fox News were a legitimate journalism enterprise, he'd be fired over this alone:
Three couples appeared on Hannity's show the other night.
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.
Only problem is, these guests were ignorant of ACA and the exchanges, and were just repeating things they hear regularly from shows like Hannity. They weren't giving accurate personal experiences.
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.
Turns out he only has four employees, and the ACA provisions he complained about only affect employers with 50 or more employees. Everything he had said about ACA harming his business wasn't true, in other words.
Next I called Allison Denijs. She’d told Hannity that she pays over $13,000 a year in premiums. 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 is] now paying around $1,100 a month for a policy with a $2,500 deductible per family member. One of their two children is not covered under the policy. She has a preexisting condition that would require purchasing additional coverage for $600 a month, which would bring the family’s grand total to around $20,000 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.
The article author checked the exchange on Allison's behalf and found a plan that would cover everyone in the family as well as Allison's preexisting condition for $7,600 per year (assuming zero federal subsidy), or "about a 60 percent reduction from what they would have to pay on the pre-Obamacare market." But Allison did not even check ACA plans before spouting off on Hannity's show.
Finally, I called Robbie and Tina Robison from Franklin, Tenn. Robbie is self-employed as a Christian youth motivational speaker. 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.
But like Allison, Robbie didn't actually check out the ACA plans. How did he decide the new plans were 50 to 75% more expensive? He says he was told this over the phone by an insurance agent.
I found a plan for them for, at most, $3,700 a year, 63 percent less than their current bill. It might cover things that they don’t need, but so does every insurance policy.
There is no doubt that there are people who are worse off from ACA, and perhaps Hannity might have found some. But he didn't. He and his crew not only didn't verify anything these guests said, they didn't verify whether the guests even tried shopping for a plan on the exchanges.
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.”
Hannity Lies About ACA (surprise surprise) - Sir Four