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Obamacare & Life Expectancy

Did average U.S. life expectancy rise, fall, or stagnate in the wake of Obamacare?

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In the period between when most provisions of Obamacare were implemented in 2014 until 2020 (when the Covid-19 pandemic began), average U.S. life expectancy had a net change of zero. This runs contrary to the modern norm of rising lifespans and was the worst six-year period in the U.S. since World War II. Correlation does not prove causation, so Obamacare may not be the root cause of this stagnation, but it either hurt, failed to help, or was overwhelmed by other factors. Moreover, supporters of the law routinely used such correlations to promote Obamacare and impugn the U.S. healthcare system. They also claimed that Obamacare would be “an absolute game changer” for substance abuse, but drug overdose deaths accelerated in the wake of the law.

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Russia Collusion Hoax

Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s former chief “fact checker,” claims that there was “no Russian collusion hoax.”

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IN FACT, hordes of prominent Democrats and media outlets, with help from FBI officials, falsely accused Trump of colluding with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election. Here are the specifics, straight from the primary sources:

In the spring of 2016, a “U.S.-based international law firm” named Perkins Coie that was “acting as counsel to the Clinton campaign” hired a “U.S.-based investigative firm” named Fusion GPS to “conduct opposition research on Trump and his associates.”
To carry out that research, Fusion GPS hired a British firm run by Christopher Steele, a “former intelligence official for the British government,” who was actively working as a “long term paid” source for the FBI.
Using money from the DNC and Clinton campaign, Steele created a series of reports collectively known as the “Steele Dossier.”
In these documents, Steele alleged “there was a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between” the Trump campaign and “Russian leadership.”
To create his dossier, Steele used sources like a former Russian government mouthpiece who Hillary Clinton called a “good friend” and “A Great Democrat,” a “public relations professional” who was a “big democratic supporter” with “extensive ties to the Kremlin and Russian government officials,” and a person who was previously investigated by the FBI on charges of spying for Russia and later admitted to fabricating allegations against Trump.
On July 5, 2016, Steele fed his dossier to the FBI, which supposedly sat on it until September 19.
Two weeks later on July 18, FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok texted FBI attorney Lisa Page, “Donald Trump is an enormous d*uche.”
One day later on July 19, Page wrote to Strzok that it was “like living in a bad dream” to watch Trump speak at the Republican National Convention.
Three days later on July 22, WikiLeaks released a cache of damaging emails “that had been hacked” from the Democratic National Committee, leading the head of the DNC to resign.
Three days later on July 25, famous pollster Nate Silver announced that polls were showing a major shift from Clinton to Trump, and for the first time, “Trump would be a narrow favorite, with a 57 percent chance of winning the Electoral College” if the election were “held today.”
One day later on July 26, Hillary Clinton allegedly approved a “proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”
One day later on July 27, Page wrote to Strzok, “Have we opened on him yet? Trump & Putin,” followed by an “angry face” emoji.
On the same day, Trump gave a press conference, and journalists peppered him with questions about Russia and the leak of the DNC emails. Trump repeatedly replied that he had nothing to do with Russia and stated that China, Russia, or an independent hacker has probably already hacked Hillary Clinton’s email server and should release the 30,000+ emails that Clinton destroyed after Congress ordered her to preserve them.
The media then repeatedly took Trump’s comments out of context to make it seem like he asked Russia to hack Clinton’s emails.
Three days later on July 31, the FBI opened a full investigation into Trump’s orbit based on “purposely vague” and “unvetted hearsay information” from two Australian diplomats in London.
Two days later on August 2, Strzok and another FBI agent met in London to pursue the Russia collusion investigation, and the FBI’s Assistant Legal Attaché in London said that Strzok told him something along the lines of, “There’s nothing to this, but we have to run it to ground.”
The same FBI Attaché wrote to Strzok’s partner about the evidence for the investigation, “Damn that’s thin,” and Strzok’s partner replied, “I know … it sucks.”
Four days later on August 6, Page wrote to Strzok, “Trump should go f himself.” Strzok replied, “F Trump,” and Page replied, “And maybe you’re meant to stay where you are because you’re meant to protect the country from that menace.”
Two days later on August 8, Page wrote to Strzok, “[Trump’s] not going to become president, right? Right?!” Strzok replied, “No. No, he’s not. We’ll stop it.”
One week later on August 15, Strzok wrote to Page that “there’s no way” Trump “gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
One month later on September 7, the CIA sent a note to Strzok and other FBI officials describing an alleged plot by Hillary Clinton to tie Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server,” but no one at the FBI took “any action” to investigate this matter.
On September 19, 2016, Strzok, Page, and the rest of the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” team received the Steele Dossier, which the FBI supposedly sat on for 75 days for reasons that “remain unresolved.”
The FBI then offered Steele “$1 million or more” of taxpayer money to “produce corroboration for any of the reported allegations” in his dossier, but Steele couldn’t do so.
The FBI also “began making regular financial payments” to Steele’s “primary sub-source,” but none of the information he provided “corroborated Steele’s reporting.”
Despite those and other “protracted efforts” to verify the Steele Dossier, the FBI “was not able to corroborate a single substantive allegation” in it, and Steele and his sources gave materially conflicting stories about where they got their information.
Nevertheless, the FBI and DOJ used Steele’s “unvetted and unverified” allegations to obtain four warrants to spy on Trump’s orbit. These warrant applications included “at least 17 significant errors or omissions” and “many additional errors” in procedures which “require that every factual assertion in a FISA application be ‘verified’.”
When the FISA Court itself later examined these applications, it reported “violations of the government’s duty of candor in all four applications” and stated that these actions constituted “unlawful surveillance and search.”
In the meantime, Steele also fed his dossier to the media and Democrats, who incessantly used it to smear Trump.
In November 2020, Trump won the election.
Less than one month after Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, the New York Times reported that the FBI had received “phone records and intercepted calls” from the NSA showing that “members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.”
Three years later, the U.S. Senate released an internal FBI document written by Strzok that directly refuted the Times story when it was published, but the FBI “declined to comment” on the Times’ reporting, thus letting the falsehood propagate for years.
Four months after Trump was inaugurated, former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed in May 2017 as a special counsel to investigate the Russia collusion allegation, and Lisa page joined Mueller’s team.
That same month, Strzok wrote to Page about her work on the Mueller probe and said, “God I suddenly want on this. You know why.” Page replied that she would “happily” leave Mueller’s team if Strzok wanted to join it, and Strzok responded, “I’m torn. … I’m the best for it, but there are others who can do OK.”
Later that same month, Strzok joined Mueller’s team until he was removed in late July after his incriminating texts with Page were revealed. Page left Mueller’s team two weeks before that.
In March 2019, more than two years after Trump’s inauguration, Mueller’s team concluded their $32 million investigation and reported that they “did not establish” or “identify evidence” that members of the “Trump Campaign” or “any U.S. persons” “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
By the time Special Counsel John Durham later tried to interview Steele and his primary sub-source who was paid by the FBI, they were “domiciled overseas,” refused to be interviewed, and claimed that they “destroyed all notes reflecting the content of their meetings and communications.”
Nearly 6 years after the Clinton campaign funded the Steele Dossier, the Federal Election Commission fined the Clinton campaign $8,000 and the DNC $105,000 for “misreporting the purpose” of the payments used to fund the Steele Dossier as “legal services” and “compliance consulting” when they were actually for “opposition research.”
In 2024, Biden’s DOJ gave $2 million of taxpayer money to settle lawsuits with Strzok and Page, and the New York Times cited the settlement as proof that the FBI’s Russian collusion probe wasn’t a “witch hunt.”

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