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Hyperbole means describing something as better or worse than it really is. The latter pretty much sums up everything Republicans have to say about the Affordable Care Act. According to them, if it doesn’t kill you, it’s going to destroy the country to the point where you’ll wish you were dead.

I’m sure the law will need improvements, but, then, that’s not their concern. They want to take us back to the days when pre-existing conditions meant you or your children couldn’t get affordable coverage, if you had a serious illness your policy would not be renewed, when insurance bean counters would deny you a test your doctor said you needed, when costs were determined by profit margins, not competition.

Those were the good ole’ days, remember?

But if Obamacare really is the catastrophe Republicans say it is, why do they make stuff up about it, as Sean Hannity and some couples he interviewed recently did. These were people whose lives had been destroyed by Obamacare. Their stories were compelling for the Fix News audience. Later, though, a small problem developed. Turns out none of it was true.

Salon journalist Eric Stern decided to follow up on the Hannity interviews and personally called the couples to get more information. That’s when the truth came out.

Paul Cox and his wife Michelle said their small business had been so adversely affected they had to lay people off. They had in fact laid people off, but not because of Obamacare. Their company had less than 50 people and did not fall under the new healthcare mandates at all.

Allison Denjis and her husband complained of outrageous hikes in premiums, only it was their own insurance company that did that. The new healthcare exchange in their state was offering better policies at cheaper rates, but they had refused to investigate them. The same thing was true for Robbie and Tina Robison who also told their story to a smiling Hannity.

I’m sure Hannity and his guests were dismayed when they heard that John Kasich, the very conservative Republican governor of Ohio, went against his Republican legislature and accepted the Obamacare expansion of Medicaid, for two reasons, he said. One was his Christian compassion. The second was the two billion dollars it would add to his state’s coffers over ten years.

I guess financially it was a no brainer to Kasich. But his reference to Christian compassion intrigued me. I often wonder why anyone would oppose the working poor having a chance to get health insurance for the first time. We know from solid research that they literally die by the thousands every year without it. What could possibly outweigh trying to prevent that from happening?

But for Christians to be against it is incomprehensible to me. I just can’t get my head around that one. I don’t want to say these people are not real Christians. What I will say is that they’re not the kind I ever want to be.