April 08, 2014 12:32 PM UTC

New Koch Ad, Same Tired Obamacare Spin

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• by: Colorado Pols

WEDNESDAY UPDATE: Pro-Obamacare group Protect Your Care responds:

"Coloradans won’t be fooled by these deceptive ads. Obamacare opponents like the Koch Brothers and their allies have no plan to help Coloradans get health care, so they keep repeating the same lies that have been debunked over and over," said Laura Chapin, Colorado state director of the pro-Affordable Care Act group Protect Your Care. "Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, Coloradans with pre-existing conditions now have health insurance. Mental health care is covered, which is critical in a state like ours where suicide is the leading cause of death for young people.  Colorado women can get mammograms and birth control with little or no out of pocket costs.

Affordable Care Act opponents like the Koch Brothers and their allies have no alternative for the 277,000 Coloradans and 7 million Americans who have signed up for health insurance, which is 7 million more people than they care about. And running ads can’t cover up that fact.”

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The Washington Post reports on a new ad from another arm of the Koch brothers family of conservative attack groups, now running in Colorado against Sen. Mark Udall on a reported $650,000 buy:

A Virginia-based nonprofit that served as the main funding arm of a political network backed by the conservative Koch brothers in 2012 is running attack ads directly for the first time, launching television commercials Tuesday against two Democratic Senatorial candidates.

The spots by Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce attempt to link campaign donations from the health care industry to Iowa Rep. Bruce Braley and Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, suggesting they gave “special favors” to insurance companies by backing Obamacare.

“The hypocrisy is shocking,” says a female narrator in the Udall ad…

In this year’s midterms, Freedom Partners is bringing in-house many of the functions it financed through other groups in the last campaign. The organization’s elevated role speaks to how the Kochs are exerting more control over the political activity they fund, a strategy that provides more accountability to fellow conservative donors who want to know how their money is being spent.

The Sunlight Foundation's Jacob Fenton adds a little more detail about this group at the Colorado Independent.

For an organization that supposedly is more directly accountable to the Koch brothers than others, we can't say the content of this ad is any more defensible than other anti-Obamacare ads that have been exposed as factually misleading. The vague allegation that Sen. Udall "worked with health insurance companies to pass Obamacare" doesn't fit with the usual anti-Obamacare attacks, but seems even more ripe for blowback. According to Open Secrets, Udall's opponent Cory Gardner has taken piles of money from health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and other health industry sources. But here's another question: why would health insurance companies be donating to Udall if Obamacare is destroying the health care system? It seems contradictory to the whole case against Obamacare Republicans are trying to make.

The ad concludes with a reference, once again, to the supposed "335,000 Coloradans facing health insurance cancellations," a talking point that has been debunked so many times it's…well, not surprising to see it again in a new ad, but for anybody who knows the facts, it's more than a little frustrating. At this point, everyone with more than a casual involvement in this debate knows that statistic is grossly misleading. There's no plausible way to claim ignorance when this has been so exhaustively explored and repudiated.

But here's another $650,000 invested in that bogus message nonetheless.