Bill Maher smashed the Republican lie about CBO report and the ACA killing jobs by destroying the bogus conservative moral argument that is the basis for every Republican Obamacare falsehood.
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BILL MAHER: Let me ask about this other issue that was in the news this week, which I think is a good thing, the decoupling of Obamacare, or healthcare, from employment. But, it was reported in the press differently. Now, what happened was the CBO — that’s the Congressional budget office — they are the arbiters, they are the umpires. We say they are impartial. I’ve quoted them many times, and say, ‘look, they are the impartial ones.’
Okay, what they said was Obamacare, over 10 years, will reduce employment by 2 million people. Okay, somehow in the media that got to be Obamacare will kill jobs. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening. What it means is that because people now, of course, can decouple, and by the way, we should never have coupled employment with healthcare in the first place. We did that during World War II because they throw salaries, so it was a way of giving a worker a benefit.
Okay, now, you know, because they passed that thing which Republicans agree with too, we should not — if you have a pre-existing condition, you have to cover that. So now people don’t have to stay in their job to get covered. So these are people choosing to leave the workforce because they finally can. Isn’t that a good thing?
ALICIA MENENDEZ: Yeah, I mean, it creates opportunity — it basically is a game of musical chairs where we have the same number of chairs but less people competing to sit in those chairs. So it creates opportunity, and as you said, free people up. So that means: you want to go hang out with your grandkids? You can do that. You want to start a business? You can do that because you’re no longer dependent on your job for your healthcare.
MAHER: Yeah disincentives to work are not always a bad thing. Americans work too much. Americans are over-worked, overstressed. They take less vacation time. They don’t retire when they want to. Not everything is GDP.
Bill Maher did something more important than get outraged about the Republicans latest ACA lie. He debunked the moral argument behind the lie. The lie about the CBO report is based on central Republican argument against Obamacare. Republicans believe to their very core that providing better access to healthcare for millions of Americans is immoral.
In the same segment S.E. Cupp dredged up the work is dignity argument, but Maher replied that not all jobs have dignity. He used the example from his own life of working at Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips was not a dignified job. A more modern example would be working at Walmart. The largest retailer in America is a place where employees don’t have access to affordable healthcare, and the wages are so terrible that employees are forced to both work and use programs like food stamps and Medicaid to survive.
Real dignity is having the freedom to leave a bad job, and not have to worry about what will happen if you or a loved gets sick. True liberty is restoration of the ability to move up the economic ladder. Programs like unemployment benefits and the ACA aren’t destroying dignity, they are enabling it.
It is fun to listen to Maher use humor to take apart Republicans. In this case, it was more important that he drove a stake through the bogus moral argument that is at the heart of the Republican lies about the ACA.
The best way to combat the Republican lies about the ACA is to destroy the baseless moral argument that their emotional house of cards is built upon.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
