IS THE MEDIA REPORTING ACCURATELY OR PUTTING OUT “FAKE NEWS?”
by Sharon Rondeau
(May 7, 2017) — In a tweet on Sunday morning shortly before 9:00 a.m. EDT, President Trump predicted that the U.S. Senate, which has yet to vote on the new health care bill passed by the House on Thursday, “will not let the American people down!”
Repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010 and known as “Obamacare,” unexpectedly again became a possibility two weeks ago when Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and other Republicans appeared to indicate that a reworked proposal from one which did not receive a vote on March 24 was under consideration.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump made repealing Obamacare a plank of his platform given rising premiums and deductibles which many Americans say they cannot afford.
Mainstream news sources have primarily reported that the Senate will alter the House bill or “write their own version,” that the measure faced “an uphill battle,” or that the Senate will not pass it at all.
The measure passed the House by a four-vote margin, 217-213, despite dire predictions. On April 13, CNN reported that its sources said that “there has been no major shift towards any agreement that can pass yet, and the lynchpin in getting a deal is still bridging the republican divide between conservatives and moderates in the house, which brought down a deal before and is still elusive now.”
No Democrats voted in favor of the House bill, and 20 Republicans voted against it.
There are 52 Republicans in the Senate.
Both before and after he took office, Trump has excoriated the mainstream media for publishing what he says is “fake news” which often casts his administration and him personally in a poor light.
In October, left-leaning CNBC reported that “Obamacare deductibles are on the rise for 2017, along with monthly premiums.
At approximately the same time, the website healthpocket.com published an analysis of predicted 2017 premiums for different age brackets over the 2016 figures in an article titled “Aging Consumers without Subsidies Hit Hardest by 2017 Obamacare Premium & Deductible Spikes.”
Medical plans in four age-based categories were uniformly expected to increase by 17% in 2017 for “silver” plans and 22% for “gold” plans.
Deductibles for families were predicted to rise to $12,393, with out-of-pocket costs expected at $13,810.
Both Republicans and Democrats have shown concern that Americans with pre-existing medical conditions could again encounter difficulty obtaining coverage under the new plan, which was a major focal point in the crafting of Obamacare. The House bill, HR 1628, keeps that protection in place while doing away with the “individual mandate” which required all citizens to have health insurance.
A PDF of the bill as it stands now can be accessed here.
