What you don't know about Obamacare can't hurt you

For some Obamacare opponents running for Congress, when the evidence doesn't support their arguments they simply don't notice it.

Carl Domino, the front-runner in the Republican primary to face off against first-term Democratic congressman Patrick Murphy in the 18th district north of Palm Beach, focused his first TV ad on Murphy's support for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

In an interview with Kaiser Health News, Domino said that most people have been hurt by the law and that “none of the promises made by those who passed the law turned out to be true.”

What about the promise of the law's sponsors that the ACA would reduce the number of Americans without health coverage? Ah, that. Domino said he was unfamiliar with the widely reported survey results from Gallup and other polling organizations showing that 8 million to 10 million people have gained insurance in 2014.

And what about that other big promise that the law would help control soaring U.S. healthcare spending? Alan Schlesinger, another Republican candidate in that congressional race, told KHN that Obamacare has done nothing to slow the rise of health costs. He said he was not familiar with studies showing significantly slower spending growth over the past several years.

Not only is Schlesinger not familiar with the law's benefits, but he's counting on voters not knowing about them either. Asked if he's worried that voters will blame Florida Republicans for blocking Medicaid expansion in that state and denying coverage to hundreds of thousands of people, he said, “I don't think the average person knows anything about it.”

It's the same in Arkansas. There, Senate Republican candidate Tom Cotton, a congressman who's challenging Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor, was asked at a news conference last week about the recent finding that the uninsured rate in his state had dropped from 22.5% in 2013 to 12.4% in mid-2014. He said he hadn't seen it.

Follow Harris Meyer on Twitter: @MHHmeyer