“So was Mr. Cantor being dishonest? Or was he just ignorant of the policy basics and unwilling to actually read the report before trumpeting his misrepresentation of what it said? It doesn’t matter — because even if it was ignorance, it was willful ignorance. Remember, the campaign against health reform has, at every stage, grabbed hold of any and every argument it could find against insuring the uninsured, with truth and logic never entering into the matter.

”Think about it. We had the nonexistent death panels. We had false claims that the Affordable Care Act will cause the deficit to balloon. We had supposed horror stories about ordinary Americans facing huge rate increases, stories that collapsed under scrutiny. And now we have a fairly innocuous technical estimate misrepresented as a tale of massive economic damage.“

-- Paul Krugman in his column, ”Health, Work, Lies," on the overreaction and misrepresentation of Congressional Budget Office numbers regarding the Affordable Care Act. Basically, people will choose to work less since some won't need the job for the insurnace. The CBO, unhelpfully to Mr. Krugman, rounded out the hours lost to two million jobs, which the GOP and some news organizations have jumped on. My amateur question is this: If some choose not to work, doesn't this create job opportunity? For the man who retires because he doesn't need health insurance from his job, doesn't this mean the company will have to hire someone else for that position?

And here's The Daily Show's version of the debacle.

Tags: Health Care, Economics 101, Paul Krugman