As I have said before, one of the reasons liberals are so hard to take seriously on health care is that they cannot resist the temptation to fudge the facts. Linda Gorman has written a good piece about a recent manifestation of this progressive proclivity:
If Families USA were a newspaper, it would be a supermarket tabloid carrying articles about alien abductions.
Families USA is promulgating the fiction that the evil Bush Administration is pushing ”Medicaid cuts” that will end civilization as we know it:
Medicaid rule changes put in place by the Bush Administration will cost Colorado more than $787.2 million … Those lost Medicaid funds will eliminate an estimated 3,500 jobs and an accompanying $134.9 million in wages, and cost the state an estimated $381 million in lost business activity.
This is, of course, pure, unadulterated BS. No one is pushing Medicaid cuts. In fact, the Bush administration has actually proposed an increase of $12 to $ 13 billion in Medicaid funding. Here’s what Families USA is griping about:
What the Bush Administration is proposing is a slightly smaller budget increase, about 7.1 percent rather than 7.4 percent.
This tactic of representing increases as cuts is, of course, a standard tactic of the Left. Which is why no thinking person should take “progressive” health care reformers seriously. They are congenitally incapable of playing it straight.
[HT WeStandFirm]
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