Right-wing media are newly outraged over the Affordable Care Act's "hardship" exemption, a provision of the original law that pardons qualifying persons from the individual mandate to purchase health insurance coverage.One conspiracy theory, favored by the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal and conservative blogs likeThe Daily Caller, is that the Obama administration 'secretly' changed the ACA last week by "quietly" adding a hardship exemption.Others like FoxNews.com suggested that the administration added the hardship exemption -- "a mega-exemption" -- to the law just three months ago. But the one thing all right-wing media agree on is that the hardship exemption "might be the death knell" for the individual mandate, as Fox put it. According to the Journal:[L]ast week the Administration quietly excused millions of people from the requirement to purchase health insurance or else pay a tax penalty.This latest political reconstruction has received zero media notice, and the Health and Human Services Department didn't think the details were worth discussing in a conference call, press materials or fact sheet.in an unrelated rule that was meant to preserve some health plans that don't comply with ObamaCare benefit and redistribution mandates. Our sources only noticed the change this week.That seven-page technical bulletin includes a paragraph and footnote that casually mention that a rule in a separate December 2013 bulletin would be extended for two more years, until 2016. Lo and behold, it turns out this second rule, which was supposed to last for only a year, allows Americans whose coverage was cancelled to opt out of the mandate altogether.
welcome to republican daytime soap opera, cast of characters you know and ........... would like to see cancelled before the next season. they never check their lies for any sort of reality they just hump in with all 4 feet and mouth flapping in the breeze, and are never right pun intended. after all they said they weren't going to let fact checkers run their campaign, you know the one against Pres.
But what right-wing media are missing in their most recent set of attacks against the ACA is that the hardship exemption has been a part of the ACA from the law's inception, and their attacks against the law's "new," "mega-exemption" guidelines are actually based on three-month old HHS guidance that was laid out under routine rule-making authority.
this also shows that they never read it even though they declared war on it before it was law, that is their MO with no fact checking if it's from Pres. it's fair game true or truer makes no difference as long as they get it in the media their base will chew on it like them until the next episode of "as the republican world spins".
