Rick Ungar

Imagine That: California Health Care Exchange's Claimed Premium Cuts Are Really 64%-146% Hikes
By Tom Blumer | May 31, 2013 | 5:14 PM EDT

When Covered California, the Golden States' health insurance exchange being set up under ObamaCare, initially announced its rates beginning in 2014, it claimed that rates will go down. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones ("if these early results hold up, Obamacare's structure seems to be doing a pretty good job at its core mission of controlling prices.") and Rick Ungar at Forbes ("the reality is that the early report card on Obamacare—at least in those states willing to give the law a chance to succeed—is looking pretty darn good") got suckered in.

It isn't so, as Avik Roy explained yesterday at Forbes (bolds are mine):

CEI's Hans Bader Dissects Rex Nutting's Fatally-flawed Analysis of Obama Spending
By Ken Shepherd | May 29, 2012 | 11:59 AM EDT

As we at NewsBusters have noted, the liberal media have done little to discredit Rex Nutting's erroneous analysis of federal spending under President Obama. Numerous conservative and libertarian critics have pointed out how fatally flawed Nutting's analysis, but we'd like to recommend Hans Bader's post at Competitive Enterprise Institute's OpenMarket.org website, who takes on not only Nutting but left-wing Forbes columnist Rick "the House GOP are hostage-taking Nazis" Ungar, another disingenuous journalist, and one who has the benefit of an affiliation with a magazine published by a famous conservative.

You can read the full May 25 post here, but here's just a taste:

Forbes Blogger Ungar Compares GOP Senators to Hostage Takers, Nazis
By Ken Shepherd | December 7, 2010 | 12:55 PM EST

"If the GOP Senate Minority Leader were to grab a Senate page and threaten to kill the innocent victim if the Democrats refused to capitulate to the party’s demands on tax cuts, we would all quickly arrive at the conclusion that the Minority Leader had lost his mind and gone too far. We simply, under no circumstances, will not tolerate threatening someone’s life in order to get what you want.

"Yet, by playing with the denial of the only economic lifeline left to millions of unemployed, this is precisely what the GOP is doing."

The rantings of a Newsweek writer or MSNBC host, right? Wrong.