Dumb Ron Johnson's Sad Story About a Sick Couples Costs Doubling a Complete Lie.

Dumb Ron Johnson didn't get away with it this time, thanks to some investigative reporting by WPT's Here and Now's Frederica Freyberg. Johnson's "If You Like Your Health Plan, You Can Keep It Act" is idiotic, and Freyberg proved it. Sadly Johnson's example story of a couple calling him up for advice, about their rates doubling to cover their cancer, never got the kind of intelligent answer they should have received. He could have put their minds at ease, but instead, exploited them. The lie stems from the fact the high risk pool is going away. So where did that estimate come from? Oh, an the couple...Johnson won't tell us who they are.

I featured the clips and corrected Johnson last week, but it's nice to see the media finally take him on.

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Freyberg wraps it up with a statement from Johnson about how he's against any kind of tax payer subsidy in the Affordable Care Act. But even the GOP's bizarre free market plan hinges on those same taxpayer subsidies. The Republican plan would dump employees health care insurance through their workplace, which today covers 49 percent of the market. That would be huge. Like Ezra Klein describes here:

Interestingly, recent Republican plans have focused on disrupting the employer market by ending, limiting, or restructuring the tax exclusion for employer-based plans. There's an extremely good case to be made that that needs to be done, but it means much more disruption for a much larger number of people. Obamacare's focus on disrupting the individual market -- and only the individual market -- is a more modest approach to health-care reform.