In the segment of Fox and Friends in this video, while Fox Business News anchor Stuart Varney is in the middle of delivering carefully constructed misinformation about the Affordable Care Act, his anti-Obama talking point is stepped on by Fox’s newest spokesmodel, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who inadvertently reduces Varney’s lie to the absurd.
First, the lie:
STUART VARNEY: United Healthcare has just dropped — we don’t know exactly how many — but thousands of doctors have been dropped from United Healthcare’s Medicare Advantage program. That leaves hundreds of thousands of patients without the doctor that they’ve had for many many years. We don’t know how many thousands have been dropped, but thousands have been dropped. What about their patients? What about the people who used to have this doctor who now no longer have this doctor? Broken promise.
Who broke the promise? If you guessed that Varney is implying it was Pres. Obama, you are correct. He, however, is lying. According the Medicare website, Medicare Advantage is not affected by the Affordable Act and so any promises the president may have made regarding the ACA did not apply to Medicare recipients.
But then, before Varney can finish, Hasselbeck, who was mentally filing her nails while he was jibber-jabbering away, jumps in:
ELISABETH HASSELBECK: And many of those people are women who are expecting babies and who may just have a real relationship with their physician and want to see the same doctor deliver possibly their second child. And they are now left in the dark in a time that they feeling quite vulnerable.
VARNEY: Most of them are elderly.
What we see here is Elisabeth Hasslebeck so eagerly piling on in an attempt to help promote the Fox News Lie of the Day that she found herself suggesting that patients on Medicare, the vast majority of whom are over age 65 (the rest are on disability), who are expectant mothers will be forced to change OB-GYNs in the middle of their pregnancies.
That said, and while it is extremely unlikely that she knew this, United Healthcare does offer maternity coverage to Medicare Advantage customers [PDF].
So who is to blame for for forcing these post-menopausal maternity patients to change doctors? That would be United Healthcare, of course, which is using Fox-driven fear of Obamacare as cover for cutting services in order to ensure that it will produce the $123 billion in revenue it projected for 2013 [PDF].