Paul Krugman: Inventing a Failure

Surprise! Republicans are opposed to Obamacare. But the lengths they'll go to to validate their beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary is startling:

Inventing a Failure, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: On Thursday, House Republicans released a deliberately misleading report on the status of health reform, crudely rigging the numbers to sustain the illusion of failure in the face of unexpected success. Are you shocked?

You aren’t, but ... the fact that this has become standard operating procedure for a major party bodes ill for America’s future.

About that report: The really big policy news of 2014, at least so far, is the spectacular recovery of the Affordable Care Act from its stumbling start... This is a problem for Republicans, who have bet the ranch on the proposition that health reform is an unfixable failure. ... How can they respond to good news?

Well,... they have ... continued to do what they’ve been doing ever since the news on Obamacare started turning positive: sling as much mud as possible at health reform, in the hope that some of it sticks. Premiums were soaring, they declared, when they have actually come in below projections. Millions of people were losing coverage, they insisted, when the great bulk of those whose policies were canceled simply replaced them with new policies. The Obama administration was cooking the books, they cried (projection, anyone?). And, of course, they keep peddling horror stories about people suffering terribly from Obamacare, not one of which has actually withstood scrutiny.

Now comes the latest claim — that many of the people who signed up for insurance aren’t actually paying their premiums. ... Previous attacks on Obamacare were pretty much fact-free; this time the claim was backed by an actual survey purporting to show that a third of enrollees hadn’t paid their first premium.

But the survey was rigged. (Are you surprised?) ...

So why are Republicans doing this? Sad to say, there’s method in their fraudulence.

First of all, it fires up the base. ... Beyond that, the constant harping on alleged failure works as innuendo even if each individual claim collapses in the face of evidence. ...

So Republicans are spreading disinformation about health reform because it works, and because they can — there is no sign that they pay any political price when their accusations are proved false.

And that observation should scare you. What happens to the Congressional Budget Office if a party that has learned that lying about numbers works takes full control of Congress? What happens if it regains the White House, too? Nothing good, that’s for sure.