Politifact, Again

Politifact just came in with its Lie of the Year.   Once again, it's not really a lie, but a mostly true statement that has been turned into strawman outrage by the right wing talk machine.

First of all, it's important to understand how the LotY is selected:  Politifact puts up a list of candidate statements and politifact readers vote.  The other candidates were mostly various incredibly wrong things that republicans had said about ACA, a few statements about NSA spying, and the eventual winner, which was "You can keep your plan if it hasn't changed since the law passed."   If you were to pick a sample of voters evenly distributed across the political spectrum, this was the guaranteed winner--ALL republicans would vote for it, because it's been repeated by all media over and over, while no other lie would get more than a percent or two of votes.

Let's look at the actual statement.  The point of it was that if you had legitimate health care insurance before the law was passed, you'd get to keep it--that there was nothing in the law that would cause you to lose it.  This is basically true. Trouble is, there were a lot of insurance policies that were really only minor-care insurance--they didn't cover major health catastrophes.  Those policies were often very cheap and the purchaser wouldn't find out they didn't have real insurance until payment for a serious health problem had been refused or the policy cancelled.  ACA required that any new policies issued be real insurance, and that's where the problem came in: The insurer had to find some way to pay for the required coverage, when they had heretofore only been charging for much cheaper, minor care coverage.  But under ACA, old policies were grandfathered--even the worthless ones.  Until the policy was significantly changed, it could continue as before.   Most insurance policies are rewritten every few years, so eventually, the bad ones would be flushed out of the system.

Of course, the insurance companies knew that they had the customers over a barrel.  All they had to do was cancel the old policy or restructure it in a way that under ACA required it to become real insurance, and they could charge "real" market prices and force customers to pay them.  Since no new fake coverage could be issued, the customers didn't have a cheap alternative anymore.  Viola!   Of course they were still hoping for a big enough backlash to get PPACA overturned, allowing them to go back to their old scams, but this was a pretty good scam too.

The lie is that this somehow proves that PPACA is a bad thing.  The fault is entirely with the scammer insurance companies, that have been scurrying out of the light like the cockroaches they are, and which the incredibly corrupt congress has forced us to do business with, instead of squashing them as they should have.  They are now limited to gouging only 20% where before 30% was commonplace.  Estimates are that about 5% of Americans will be harmed by these price hikes, nearly all of them well-to-do, and that the VAST majority of Americans will see their health insurance costs go down, often quite dramatically.