BOB GARFIELD:  As the GOP attempts to keep its promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the government itself, the government bound to uphold the nation's laws, is agitating against Obamacare from within. Not only has President Trump sworn to starve Obamacare into collapse, his Department of Health and Human Services has produced taxpayer—funded anti—ACA propaganda. Sam Stein is the politics editor at The Daily Beast and he’s been looking into this.

SAM STEIN:  One of the first notable things that they did was they pulled advertising dollars designed to tell people when the enrollment period ended. Now, anyone who does this stuff for a living knows that you buy health insurance, like much of any other product, the closer you get to the deadline to buy that product. So when you pull the advertisement dollars towards the end of the enrollment period, you really are hurting the possibility of mass enrollment.

BOB GARFIELD:  So that's kind of the starvation strategy.

SAM STEIN:  Correct.

BOB GARFIELD:  If people forget to reenroll, well, that's –

SAM STEIN:  Too bad.

BOB GARFIELD:  — too bad, okay.

SAM STEIN:  But then it went beyond that. So suddenly, the Department of Health and Human Services’ YouTube page, there began to pop up these testimonial videos of people who were harmed by Obamacare. They were small business owners, family members, mothers. These videos were doing very, very poorly online, I mean, something like 100 to 200 views total for each of the videos. But [LAUGHS] they were promoted by the Department of Health and Human Services, and so we began to wonder, well, what, what is going on here? And we dug into it and we talked to our sources, and what we found out was that the Department of Health and Human Services was using the budget that was, ostensibly, for promoting the Affordable Care Act to fund the creation of these videos, which were ostensibly done to undermine the Affordable Care Act.

And it got worse from there. If you looked at the Department of Health and Human Services’ website and you examined how it appeared prior to January 20th and post—January 20^th, you began to pick up these notable fundamental changes. Pages that were meant to educate the public about the benefits of Obamacare suddenly had been taken down. You couldn't get easy access to healthcare.gov, which is the portal to sign up for Obamacare through the Department's website anymore. And even references to the Affordable Care Act had been taken off the website and replaced with phrases like “the current law.”

BOB GARFIELD:  Can we listen to what some of these videos sounded like?

 [CLIPS]:

WOMAN:  This is a 22—year—old developmentally disabled young man who has a very rare developmental disability. The biggest issue is that as we expand Obamacare and Medicaid to able—bodied people, what’s happening is we’re hurting the truly most vulnerable. There’s just not enough money to go around, so the first cut, unfortunately, are the truly most vulnerable.

MAN:  I’m an IT guy. I know how websites work, and this wasn't working properly. I ended up then calling the helpdesk and, again, all they did was walk through the same web form over and over and over again, only to see it fail again and again.

WOMAN:  We saved all this money, worked hard, both of us, over the years because we were brought up to stand on your own two feet. Now, with this health care, it’s taken our knees out from under us.

 [END CLIP]

SAM STEIN:  I talked to a few people who appeared in the ads. One of them, a doctor from Kentucky, said something that was very revealing to me, which is that he's not a fan of the Affordable Care Act but he’s not a passionate critic of it either. And he said when he was sent down in the studio at HHS, he let it be known to the people there that, you know, he had problems with the law but he wasn’t going to bash it outright. And what they encouraged him to do was speak more critically of the law for the camera. And he said openly to me that he felt like they were trying to get him to say something that they could use.

BOB GARFIELD:  I have to ask you if there's any question of just the legality of this program, of the, the government using taxpayer money to criticize [LAUGHS] the very law that it is charged with enforcing?

SAM STEIN:  So that’s a really good question, and it's the one that sort of vexed me in my reporting of this story. I don't think that in the creation of these videos or the way that they edited or tampered with their website that they violated law. And, and the lawyers I talked to and the ethicists I talked to say they don't think so.

But there was a third component to my story where it does get into sort of this very murky gray zone, and that is on their respective Twitter handle, In addition to the changes that we’ve discussed, Dr. Tom Price who is the secretary at HHS, and the HSS official Twitter handle both have semi—regularly tweeted not only their criticism of Obamacare and as well as promoting these videos, they've also tweeted their encouragement of congressional legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare. That’s where we begin to get into this ethically and legally dubious area. You are, as a federal employee, prohibited from outwardly advocating for passage of legislation.

BOB GARFIELD:  Under the Hatch Act.

[BOTH SPEAK/OVERLAP]

SAM STEIN:  Well, it’s not just the Hatch Act. There’s an Anti—Lobbying Act as well, which makes these prohibitions. And then, not to bore the listener too much, but there are statutorial provisions within the Appropriations Act that have these type of prohibitions, as well. Now, the lawyers I talk to say that in encouraging the House, for instance, to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with their own legislation, Dr. Price sort of got really close to the letter of the law. Had he actively encouraged people to make phone calls, for instance, to lawmakers to pass the act, had he actively encouraged people to write letters to members of Congress encouraging them to pass repeal and replace, then he definitely would have been in violation of the law.

BOB GARFIELD:  I wonder what life is like for the bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services who, until mid—January, were charged with making Obamacare work and now have been thrust into undercutting the very program [LAUGHS] that, up until very recently, they were trying to facilitate.

SAM STEIN:  It’s whiplash, for starters, because it's not a subtle difference, it’s a 180-degree difference. And the other thing that you have to keep in mind that these people who work as careerists in this agency, at a fundamental level, it's not really about the act of the law itself, it’s about the idea of giving, providing people health and human services, so following the actual title of the agency. And part of what allowed me to report this out was that there's an intense sense of frustration and disenchantment that’s happening within HHS over the direction that they’re taking. They understand that this administration is critical of Obamacare and they fully respect the administration’s ability to put in their own health care system, as well as to put in a much more conservative health care system than Obama did. But where they get frustrated is in seeing actual policies put in place that they believe will fundamentally impact people's health.

BOB GARFIELD:  Sam, thank you very much.

SAM STEIN:  Hey, thank you very much for having me.

BOB GARFIELD:  Sam Stein is the politics editor at The Daily Beast.

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Coming up, a dying British infant becomes a pawn in the US health care debate.

MELANIE PHILLIPS:  The evidence was overwhelmingly against what these American writers were saying. All they had to do was look at the evidence, and it was quite clear to me that none of them had the faintest idea what they were talking about. None of them had actually looked at the evidence. None of them actually read the medical reports. None of them had done anything other than leaped to a conclusion that socialized medical care kills children.

BOB GARFIELD:  This is On the Media.

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