News of Obamacare’s problems didn’t happen in vacuum. The law got years of support from a complicit media which praised the law, attacked its opponents and ignored adverse consequences. Below are six examples of journalists supporting the law.
During World News on Dec. 18, 2009, anchor Charlie Gibson asked ABC’s Dr. Tim Johnson whether it was worth enacting health reform without a public option or Medicaid expansion. Johnson said it was because the status quo was “headed for financial and health care disaster.”
Charlie Rose asked Florida Sen. Marco Rubio what the “best thing” he could say about Obama’s health law. Rubio answered that Obamacare forced Americans to have a conversation about health care. “That’s it?” Rose asked during the Jan. 13, 2015 episode of his show on PBS.
In the midst of the debate over health care reform in 2009, ABC showed a business owner and a mother who lamented the costs of their health plans. After they expressed their discontent on-screen, ABC correspondent David Wright said, “Expectations are low, but the need is obvious.”
New York Times writer David Leonhardt said in 2010 after President Obama passed his health law that it was the “federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.”
NBC medical correspondent Nancy Snyderman said on July 22, 2009, during Hardball with Chris Matthews that not passing Obamacare would cost the U.S. “big time.” She even warned the U.S. would not be a world power without it. “I don’t think we’re going to be a great world power,” she said.
Just seven months before the AP reported on Obamacare’s problems, New York Magazine writer Jonathan Chait derided the law’s “haters” for refusing to “accept reality.”
