The Heritage Foundation interviews itself & comes to a shocking conclusion!!

As I've noted before, "The Daily Signal" is a front site for the right-wing think-tank-turned-propaganda-machine Heritage Foundation.

In their latest bit of silliness, they've come up with a modified version of Sharyl "a stuck key on my computer means Obama is spying on me!" Attkisson's laughable butchering of math last year.

When Attkisson posted her phantom numbers, one of the biggest ways she came up with her phony tally of how many people have gained healthcare coverage was to simply ignore Medicaid expansion completely. Apparently Medicaid "doesn't count" as healthcare coverage for some reason or another (or perhaps it's the other way around: To conservatives, anyone who qualifies for Medicaid apparently "doesn't count" as a human being). As a result, she was able to lop off about 6.1 million newly enrolled Medicaid recipients at the time (this is now up to perhaps 10 million newly covered out of the 14.5 million or so who've been added to the Medicaid rolls since the ACA was enacted).

This time around, a "Melissa Quinn" has posted a 700-piece article which purports to blow the lid off the most shocking scandal of the decade:

Nearly two years after Obamacare’s implementation, a new survey found that the number of uninsured Americans decreased to less than 10 percent of the population in the first three months of 2015, which is the lowest level in the survey’s 50-year history.

However, experts say the change could be mostly attributed to the Obama administration’s expansion of Medicaid.

I'm quite serious. That's it. That's the entire article. The rest of it simply rehashes the recent CDC report findings (that the national uninsured rate has dropped by about 15.8 million people since ACA exchange & Medicaid expansion enrollment started in October 2013), then quotes a "senior research fellow in health policy at the Heritage Foundation" (yes, that's right...the Daily Signal's parent company) who "reveals" the "ugly" truth: Most of the gain came from Medicaid.

The hilarious thing is that the entire article, from the headline ("Under Obamacare, Uninsured Rate Fell to Lowest Level in 50 Years. Why There’s More to That Number") on, tries to act as though this is some sort of exposé, when in fact it's pretty well understood. I've noted this on many occasions: Roughly 10 million of the newly insured are via Medicaid, with the other 5-6 million coming from private policies. I'm not sure why this is in any way controversial or surprising.

Even more amusingly, Ms. Quinn goes on to post the negative opinion of Medicaid according to the "director of the Center for Health Policy Studies" ...for the Heritage Foundation, who says Medicaid Baaaad® because it's harder for people on Medicaid to get a doctor's appointment, they have to stay in the hospital longer and are more likely to die than other people.

Setting aside the fact that a) the "Medicaid enrollees can't get an appointment" meme appears to be wrong or at least vastly overblown; b) Even if it was true, "not getting an appointment for months" still beats the hell out of "not getting an appointment ever"; and c) the reason Medicaid enrollees may tend to require longer hospital stays and have a higher mortality rate is likely because they haven't been able to get decent healthcare until they enrolled, what you're left with is a Heritage Foundation employee interviewing two other Heritage Foundation employees to see what they think of a socialized medicine program.

Needless to say, all three roundly agree that it's a Bad Thing® because reasons.