Competition for the hearts and minds of the voters in 2014 has begun with a bang—the opening salvo in the conservatives’ pre-election fight against Obamacare. This week, Americans for Prosperity, a group that espouses small government and is funded by the Koch Brothers, aimed directly at something near and dear to many Americans: the ability to choose their own doctors.
Choice became an issue way back in the 1990s, when the Clinton plan was kicking around, and more recently in the debate over the Affordable Care Act. Remember when the president said that if you liked your doctors with his plan you could keep them? So it’s not surprising that Americans for Prosperity would choose that as a theme for an anti-Obamacare TV commercial, which is running in Virginia and Ohio but soon to go national. Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity said, “Too often we fell into a broad-based ideological argument, and I think we failed to get at ‘Look at what they’re doing and how it impacts you.’” Sounds good, no? That’s what we’ve been preaching to journalists for some time, in fact, an honest look at how the thing works.
But on that score, the commercial fails. It is clever. It does contain a kernel of truth but overall it’s misleading and deceptive.