Today I wish to focus on one especially disturbing case of healthcare hypocrisy by Josh Hawley who is running for a US Senate seat in Missouri. My recent posts have focused on Republican hypocrisy on healthcare, specifically the pre-exiting conditions safeguard built into the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or Obamacare. In these posts I have described recent Republican dishonest claims of support for this important safeguard while their actions actions attempt to undermine it.

I find Josh Hawley to be a particularly disturbing healthcare hypocrite. He now claims to be in favor of pre-existing condition coverage. I find Hawley’s actions as Missouri Attorney General inconsistent with that claim.

But Hawley, as the state’s top lawyer, also has added Missouri to a Texas lawsuit that would end the federal Affordable Care Act, which requires insurers to cover pre-existing conditions.

This quote is from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch article “Ad check: Hawley on pre-existing health conditions”.

The article also gives us a bit on how Hawley rationalizes his seemingly conflicting stances.

In a telephone interview with reporters Oct. 1, Hawley said he wanted to first gut the law via the lawsuit and then replace it with an improved version when he gets to the Senate.

First and second, it assumes he will get to the Senate and the freshman Senator will hold sway over the Republican majority which will improve on the ACA. Third, I would remind him that the Republican Senate has not had success in passing a healthcare bill. They did come close once but it would not have been good news for those with pre-existing conditions.

Another article from the same paper “Messenger: Hawley wants transparency in government, except for his own office” adresses his inconistent stances on transparency regarding sexual harassment complaints.

Watch what they do, not what they say