Another bogus horror story

No, I don’t mean The Conjuring (reviewed in the previous post); I mean yet another political ad featuring somebody complaining about the Affordable Care Act who actually turns out to have benefited from it.

An article by Eli Stokols at KDVR Fox-31 in Denver has the details, but in outline, the ad in question features a woman named Richelle McKim who says her family was unable to afford their healthcare plan (a subtitle says she had to go back to work) and that Senator “Mark Udall’s vote for Obamacare has hurt families in Colorado.”

But she told the station that her going back to work (which she did back in 2010) had nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act as such.

Some time back her husband did go without health insurance for a while because his high blood pressure meant insuring him would have cost the family an additional $800 a month. Of course, the Affordable Care Act now prevents insurance companies from denying coverage or jacking up rates because of a pre-existing condition. (It also caps out-of-pocket spending on medical care, which most people seem not to realize.)

Another thing: According to Gallup, the percentage of people in Colorado without health insurance plummeted from 17 percent in 2013 to just 11 percent now, which sounds like Colorado families being helped rather than hurt.

It’s remarkable how consistently these supposed horror stories have turned out to be at best misleading when they aren’t just plain false (even featuring actors pretending to be Obamacare victims). Earlier this year Stephen Colbert did a hilarious segment on that, part of it featuring alleged non-actor Sir Patrick Stewart.



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