"The health care ads being run by Americans for Prosperity — one of the many frantically waving arms of the Koch brothers — are a gift to fact checkers everywhere. Because they deliberately twist the truth to persuade people to 'stop supporting Obamacare' ...”

...................................................................................................................................................................
More ‘Pinocchios’ for the Koch Brothers, Please
By David Firestone, April 24, 2014

The health care ads being run by Americans for Prosperity — one of the many frantically waving arms of the Koch brothers — are a gift to fact checkers everywhere. Because they deliberately twist the truth to persuade people to “stop supporting Obamacare,” they have become a machine for producing “Pinocchios,” the mendacity rating system used by Glenn Kessler at The Washington Post.

In today’s installment, Mr. Kessler gave two Pinocchios (out of four) to three A.F.P. ads that went up this week. He dinged the ad below for falsely claiming that health insurance premiums are up by 90 percent in New Hampshire.



And he criticized this series of ads for suggesting that hundreds of thousands of people in Michigan and Colorado lost their insurance because of the Affordable Care Act, without pointing out that many of those policies were later extended or renewed.



Those Pinocchios are fine as far as they go. But since this is an editorial-page blog, we can go a little further than Mr. Kessler and toss many more long noses at the Koch ads. (Does this dial go to 11?)

What’s truly erroneous about all these ads (the full series of which is available on the A.F.P. website, if you have the fortitude) isn’t so much what they say as what they never say. They give viewers the impression that all the pre-existing problems with the health insurance system are the fault of Mr. Obama’s law, never bothering to explain how bad things have been for decades.

For example, it’s true that health insurance premiums will be going up for some people under the new system, in most cases because they will have better coverage. But premiums for private insurance have been rapidly escalating for years, far beyond inflation. Since 2003, they went up by 80 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly three times as fast as wages and inflation. And the ads never mention the millions who will now get insurance coverage for free or extremely low cost because of the program’s subsidies. Those people aren’t the Kochs’ intended audience.

Similarly, insurance companies used to routinely cancel individual policies, sometimes because the policy holders got sick, or because the companies decided not to do business in a state or region anymore. They can’t do that now. But the ads never mention that, instead falsely suggesting that vast numbers of ordinary people have been left without coverage because of the law.

As Politico reported yesterday, a new study says that millions of the so-called “cancelled” policies under the Affordable Care Act (which were actually policy upgrades) would have been cancelled anyway by the policyholders. Most people who have individual policies don’t keep them for longer than a year, either because they join a new employer’s plan or change their own policies.

That’s the kind of context you will never get in a Koch ad, whether or not the texts of the ads are literally correct. The billionaires behind this effort are on a crusade to end Democratic control of the Senate and ultimately to discredit the idea that government can improve people’s lives through a social program. Context just gets in their way.
...................................................................................................................................................................