Fox's misinformation campaign on the Affordable Care Act continues: Fox Lies About Medicaid Gap It Encouraged :
Fox News anchor Bret Baier erroneously claimed that low income Americans not covered by the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) must pay the law's penalty for not having health insurance despite the ACA's explicit exemption for those individuals.
On the March 18 edition of Fox News' Special Report, Baier aired a segment highlighting those Americans who would be left without health insurance, even though the uninsured population will be reduced. He then claimed those who were supposed to be covered by the law's Medicaid expansion, but live in GOP-led states that opted out of the expansion, would be forced to pay the law's penalty for being uninsured:
BAIER: For those people, they not only face the prospect of not having health insurance coverage despite Obamacare, but now they will have to pay a penalty because of it.
But Baier is wrong. The ACA allows people in states which have opted out of Medicaid expansion, but would have qualified for Medicaid under that expansion, to apply for a hardship exemption which waives the penalty fee for those citizens.
As they noted, this is part of a pattern for Fox we've seen over and over again:
The network repeatedly insisted that the expansion of Medicaid is unaffordable for states, and hid the GOP's role in creating the Medicaid gap, while some of its personalities praised Republicans for not accepting Medicaid coverage for their poorest residents.
