The GOP's Last Line of Defense on Obamacare

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

31 March 14

pparently, the last line of defense that the Republicans have on the Affordable Care Act is to argue that the administration is cooking the books, or that numbers don't mean what they mean, or that math has become politically inconvenient for them. Over the weekend, Rick Santorum ran that rap on Meet The Press, and Senator John Barrasso did the same thing over on Rupert's Playhouse. Torture porn enthusiast Marc Thiessen chips in from his mysteriously durable perch at The Washington Post. Jonathan Cohn has a good wrap-up of the phenomenon in which he makes the point that denying reality always has been a go-to move for these folks.

Even accounting for the fact that some of these people won't actually pay their premiums, these figures would seem to undermine-or at least weaken-the argument that Obamacare is a catastrophic failure. Republicans and many of their allies obviously think otherwise. They are doing what they almost always do when data confounds their previously held beliefs. They are challenging the statistics-primarily, by suggesting that most of the people getting insurance already had coverage. Some, like Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, say the administration is "cooking the books." Others, like Senator Ted Cruz, say that the number of people without insurance is actually rising.

It's hard to know where to go with this. One side of the debate simply has its fingers in its ears, la-la-la'ing its way merrily through its own version of reality. The other side is still trying to wrestle a new law into place. People out in the country believe what they want to believe. Some lives are made better. That seems to count less and less.