On a day when television viewers could watch a Republican presidential debate in which one of the issues was the size of a candidate's hands, President Barack Obama was making the case why so many have tuned in to the unbecoming, increasingly nasty exchanges among the GOP aspirants.
In Milwaukee, the president stood before an audience and said what he knew was absolutely not true about his Affordable Care Act (ACA) legislation - that it's unpopularity is due to Republicans being "just against it."
Nothing could be further from the truth. The legislation is unpopular because the critical promises Obama made about his signature program were not just broken. They were shattered.
He said patients could keep their doctor. In many cases, they couldn't. He said they could stay with their insurance companies. In many cases, and increasingly, they cannot. He said insurance companies would be reimbursed for some of their losses. They haven't been. He said everyone who had health insurance under the law would save money. They haven't. Thousands of people insured through ACA have seen huge premium increases.
In Chattanooga on Thursday, for example, a spokesman for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee said the insurance company is expected to seek a rate increase in the 30 percent range for 2017 enrollees in the ACA's health care exchange. This follows a sizable rate increase for 2016.
"Over the last two years, we have had $300 million in losses [on the exchange]," said Roy Vaughn, the company's vice president for corporate communications. "That is not something we can sustain forever."
Elsewhere, United Health Group Inc. reported it could lose $475 million on its exchange business and may opt out for 2017. Another insurer, Aetna, questioned the viability of the exchanges. And since the law was passed, a dozen nonprofit insurance cooperatives have opened and closed, forcing 750,000 enrollees to find new plans.
Those are the facts, not Republican spin. Obama, however, only wanted to tout the numbers on the front end - that 20 million have signed up for the Affordable Care Act.
"Look, you wouldn't know any of this if you listened to the politicians on the other side out there about this who are obsessed with repealing this law," he said. "To them, the facts I just mentioned don't matter, because this is an issue of ideology."
Unfortunately, even Obama's 20 million number is an obfuscation because it includes people signed up during state insurance expansions and children who stayed on their parents' insurance. After all, only 12.7 million consumers signed up for insurance on the health exchanges through the open enrollment period on Jan 31, according to his own secretary of health and human services.
The real problem the ACA is having is one that was predicted from the outset. The law needs the healthy young to enroll to subsidize higher costs for the sicker elderly. Otherwise, the already dubious monetary scheme to pay for health care doesn't work out.
The elderly, with high claims, signed up, all right. The young, on the other hand, have not, and many have chosen to pay the fines for not having insurance rather than pay the higher premiums. That left insurers deeply in the red.
"We knew that we would get some sick people," said Kelly Paulk, vice president of product strategy and individual markets for BlueCross, "but we just got more sick people than we expected and they were sicker than expected."
Six years after the ACA passed Congress, a Rasmussen survey released Thursday found 54 percent of likely U.S. voters still have an unfavorable opinion of the law.
And although Republicans only have controlled both houses of Congress for a little more than a year and don't have anywhere close to a veto-proof majority, 2016 presidential voters are angry the GOP hasn't done anything about the ACA. Or about illegal immigration. Or the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage. Or the country's weak image around the world.
Which brings us to Thursday's debate in Detroit.
The American people are righteously angry at Obama and see an opening against a Democratic front-runner who has proved to be unlikable, a poor campaigner, and fast and loose with the truth.
But one of the deepest benches in Republican history has been whittled down to two first-term U.S. senators, a governor and front-runner Donald Trump, he of the questionable hand size. Yet Trump has taken positions closer to Obama than to his fellow candidates on many issues, including the Affordable Care Act, where he recently voiced support for its individual mandate (but dropped the support when he released details of his plan Wednesday).
In the debate, the other candidates repeatedly exposed him for a variety of contradictory opinions on issues, including his 2008 campaign contributions to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, his hard-line stance on illegal immigration and the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.
U.S. voters are right to be tired of a president who continues to lie about what he hopes will be a part of his legacy, but they don't need a prevaricating Republican version of the same man.