Dana Loesch's Zombie Lie

Via Justin Gibson, I came across an exchange between Dana Loesch and Cornell Belcher on Anderson Cooper 360. Cooper brought up the fact that the GOP was blatantly hypocritical with reports from the Congressional Budget Office, at times acting like the reports were the holy gospel when it supported their arguments and then dismissing it as biased or flawed when the facts (as they so often do) completely contradict the Republic narrative.

Loesch, unsurprisingly, ignored the point about hypocrisy and simply argued for her favorite CBO study:

First of all, the CBO report that was issued which said that the $1 trillion health control law was going to be deficit neutral, within a week of that report being issued, there was a lesser-known report that was also issued that was based upon an inquiry that came from Paul Ryan.

He asked the CBO to consider the costs of the health care law in -- also with the doc fix. That's the -- the infamous Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors and that. And what the CBO discovered was that those two pieces of legislation together actually added to the deficit.

And it's interesting to note, too, that Nancy Pelosi initially had the doc fix in the health care legislation, but it was removed. So, at one point -- it was removed before the CBO scored it. So, at one point, they thought that these two pieces of legislation, that this could be coupled together, that they were related.

But those two things together actually do add to the deficit. And that's the little known thing that nobody's talking about.

This claim by Loesch is an instance of what Paul Krugman has been calling a zombie lie. The costs of reimbursing doctors in Medicare was going to go up anyway, at least if we wanted to continue to have Medicare, but Republicans are insisting that this be included in the "cost of health care reform."
Krugman:

If You Read This Blog Post, You Will Die

Eventually. Of course, if you don’t read it you’ll eventually die, too.

So, would it make sense to consider the fact of your eventual mortality a cost of reading this blog post? Everyone who thinks so, raise your hands.

And yet, Republicans are applying exactly the same logic to health care reform. They’re insisting that the cost of the “doc fix” — the routine increases in Medicare fees that are necessary to avoid making it impossible to get doctors to cover patients — should be counted as part of the cost of the Affordable Care Act. That’s even though the doc fix would have been equally necessary if the Act had never passed.

And yes, we’ve been through this many times. Another day, another zombie lie attacks our brains.