Mehmet Oz is either a moron or a liar. Either way, he's wrong

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I didn't want to talk about this today. I had planned on writing a very clever and highly nuanced commentary on American patriarchy. But the man who runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the Affordable Care Act, forced my hand.

Mehmet Oz is a moron or a liar. It's unclear which. In any case, he's wrong. You cannot – literally cannot – commit Obamacare fraud. Anyone saying otherwise is scamming you.

Tuesday, Oz said:

We believe that 35 percent, roughly, of the people that are using the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, exchanges, because they’ve never used the program once, they never filed a claim, may not be legit. And that actual number may translate to benefit of 5, 6 million people, we could be paying premiums for, because they don’t have to contribute anything, so they don’t even know they’re getting it. These are people who are on Medicaid, and someone, often a broker, dishonestly enrolling them in the Affordable Care Act. They're in two states at once getting full insurance, paid for by us, in multiple states at once. So we have evaluated these numbers. They are extremely concerning. ... If you care about the ACA, then you want us to take the fraud out.

Virtually everything here is fiction, but I'll start with this. People who earn so little that "they don’t have to contribute anything" are on Medicaid, not Obamacare. They cannot be on both. If they are bumped down to Medicaid but still get Obamacare subsidies, they must pay them back. They cannot "not know they’re getting it," because the IRS won't let them not know.

Meanwhile, people on Obamacare contribute. Indeed, paying is the point. Otherwise we would be on Medicaid. During open enrollment, we estimate how much we are going to earn over the year. The subsidies are based on that estimate. If we earn less, we might get a refund at tax time. If we earn more, we might owe. We pay up front with monthly premiums. We pay on the back end if our estimates are off. Either way, we pay. Enrollees cannot "not be legit."

Moreover, the IRS gets its due. Rightwingers leave law enforcement out of their dystopian portrayals of Obamacare. They want you to believe that enrollees are getting government handouts while taxpayers are getting fleeced. They don't mention the fact that the IRS will come a-calling if your numbers are off. I know this personally. One year, I earned much more than expected, but failed to adjust my "premium tax credits." Trust me, the IRS got its due.

As for "they never filed a claim," I hesitate to explain for fear of insulting your intelligence, but here goes: If there are no claims, it's because your doctor didn't file one. If your doctor didn't file one, it's because you were healthy enough to skip seeing your doctor. Moreover, as a (former) Obamacare enrollee, I have never filed a claim, because I am not a doctor. That Oz cites this as evidence of fraud is so stupid that you have to wonder what's really going on.

What's really going on is the president and his party need plausible cover for what they want to do – what they are in fact doing – which is deliberately making the people of this country sicker, poorer and meaner, which in turn makes all of us, including healthy Americans, much easier to control. Of course, they can't just come out and say that softening resistance to social domination is their goal, so they say things like "the ACA’s dwindling enrollment is the result of necessary initiatives to cut waste and fraud after Democrats focused on growing the program but did too little to scrutinize who was signing up," according to the Post.

Last year, Trump and the Republicans chose to allow subsidies to expire. The immediate result was monthly premiums doubling, tripling and even quadrupling. Since then, millions have dropped out, not because they didn't belong, but because they couldn't afford it.

The president and his party want you to think the fraud is getting something for nothing. But in their minds, the fraud is something much more threatening to their goal of social domination: a government that honors and advances individual liberty. That sounds terrible to decent law-abiding people, especially with their own – red states use Obamacare more than blue states – so they claim that their treachery is actually a noble thing worth sacrificing for. As Oz said, "if you care about the ACA, then you want us to take the fraud out."

It's not noble. It's sadistic. They take pleasure in inflicting pain, an aspect of American politics that does not get the attention it deserves. The destruction of Obamacare is part of a larger project by which the elites of this country (the Epstein class, if you wish) have exacted their revenge on meritocracy. The democratic process, equal treatment under law, economic policies expanding the middle class – these and more conspired to not only elect the first Black president but empower generations of women to believe they control their fates. To the GOP's reactionary mind, such a consequence is a perversion of "the natural order." Sacrificing their own people – deep-red Kentucky is seeing the fastest rate of Obamacare dropouts – in the restoration of America as a white man's country is a small price to pay.

I am no longer on Obamacare and I can't decide which is worse: getting priced out of my health insurance or being lied to about why. Perhaps even more galling is the fact that few reporters seem to understand what's really going on, as if they are so immune to rightwing sadism that it doesn't occur to them whether to ask Mehmet Oz if he's a moron or a liar.

That's all for today. Please consider subscribing! I know you like it. I know you'll love the price! For just $9 a month, you get so much, plus the satisfaction of supporting independent journalism. (Don't know if you're a subscriber? Check your status below.) –JS