Among all of the lying Republican liars running for re-election on the basis of their love for the Affordable Care Act's protections, none is more humungous than Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
Here's what he said in Tuesday night's debate against his Democratic challenger, Rep. Beto O'Rourke: "We can protect pre-existing conditions, and you need to understand, everyone agrees we're going to protect pre-existing conditions."
Here's what he said back in June about his state's lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act, and specifically the Trump administration's decision to argue that the protections for coverage for people with pre-existing conditions is unconstitutional: "I think that is a reasonable position for the Justice Department to take." He's arguing, against most legal experts from the right and the left who call the administration's position "absurd" and "ludicrous," that Congress' decision to leave all parts of the ACA intact (except the individual mandate when it repealed that provision in the tax law) is meaningless.
Cruz is so committed to the idea that these protections don't actually need to exist that he offered a proposal to allow insurance companies to sell policies that don't comply with the law, provided they also offer policies that do. Guess which policies the insurance companies would make affordable, and which ridiculously expensive.
And here's what Cruz said when he was running for president in 2016: he was going to "repeal every word of Obamacare." That's actually one thing Cruz said that's not a lie. That's precisely what he's wanted to do for as long as he's been in office. Remember his first big splash in the Senate, when he tried to filibuster with a reading of Green Eggs and Ham to defund Obamacare, and then conned the House maniacs into voting to shut down the government over it?
Yeah, he's not lying about how much it wants to make the ACA go away. What he IS lying about is that he gives a damn about the people who will lose coverage if that happens.
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