It’s hard to believe that Republicans take the health care debate very seriously when Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) — one of the party’s main spokespeople on Obamacare — doesn’t even know the number of uninsured in his own state. During an appearance on MSNBC ‘s ‘Morning Joe’ on Monday, Johnson sought to dismiss the success of Massachusetts’ reform in lowering the number of uninsured by claiming that the state had most of its people covered before Mitt Romney enacted Romneycare in 2006. He then went on to falsely claim that his home state of Wisconsin enjoys similarly high rates of insurance coverage:

ZEKE EMANUEL: Look at Massachusetts, which does have an individual mandate. Has a market just the way the president’s Affordable Care Act put into place. What has happened to premiums in the individual market there? They have gone down 40 percent compared to a 14 percent increase in the rest of the country.

JOHNSON: Massachusetts already had a very high level of people insured, as does Wisconsin. Wisconsin did not need health care law to get 95 percent of the people insured.

EMANUEL: You do not have 95 percent — you have 89 percent …you don’t have 95 percent. Only in Massachusetts has over 95 percent ….

JOHNSON: In Wisconsin we have 95 percent.

Watch it:

A man who supports the complete repeal of the Affordable Care Act — while personally enjoying tax-payer supported insurance as a U.S. senator — may not be too concerned about how many people actually don’t have insurance in his own state. But according to the latest Census, nine percent of Wisconsinites are uninsured, which means that the insurance rate is at about 91, four points below Johnson’s proclamation (not to mention that 30 percent are insured through government-financed Medicare or Medicaid; 60 percent have employer-based coverage or buy insurance on the individual market).

During the segment Steve Rattner also pointed out that should the Supreme Court strike down the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, 16 to 20 million Americans would lose their health insurance coverage and private health insurance premiums would increase by 15 percent. But here too, Johnson seemed unperturbed, dismissing the estimates by inexplicably claiming that the ACA’s system of private insurers and providers would lead to greater “government control.”

In his editorial yesterday claiming that the his daughter Carey would have been unable to receive a life-saving heart operation under the Affordable Care Act, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) argued that the new law stifles medical innovation and would jeopardize new medical breakthroughs :

I can’t help but reflect on a medical miracle made possible by the American health-care system. The procedure that saved her, and has given her a chance at a full life, was available because America has a free-market system that has advanced medicine at a phenomenal pace. [...]

The plain truth is that the American system is better at rewarding innovation and responding to consumer needs. But the history of government-led care is there for all to see. Are we doomed to repeat it?

America has certainly had its share of medical breakthroughs, but the procedure Johnson’s daughter received may not have been developed in the United States but rather in Brazil or France — nations that now benefit from some form of universal coverage.

According to CAP Senior Fellow (and resident biochemist) Dr. Lesley Russell, it is most likely that the surgery Carey had was first performed and reported in Brazil in 1975, where doctors described their version of the procedure as “the first successful report of total correction of transposition of the great vessels at the arterial level.” Alternatively, Johnson’s daughter may have had what’s known as The LeCompte procedure, which was developed in France in 1981.

Unfortunately for Johnson, both country’s systems seem far more government-centered than the Affordable Care Act. While Brazil’s system has evolved over time, France — which is often thought to have the best system in the world — has compulsory health insurance. Care is distributed through large occupation-based funds—alliances of professional groups—that are overseen by the government (it sets reimbursement fees with physicians and establishes premiums) and financed through taxes and general government revenues.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal suggesting that his daughter Carey may have died from a heart condition were she treated under the Affordable Care Act. The piece reads like a hit piece from the summer of 2009, when Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) was suggesting that the Affordable Care Act would pull the plug on grandma and Reps. Steve King (R-IA), Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Virginia Foxx (R-NC) were arguing that reform would literally kill Americans.

A year out, these kinds of arguments sound absurd, and so Johnson is now touting what TPM’s Brian Beutler calls a “retroactive twist on the ‘death panels’ hoax.” From Johnson’s op-ed:

I don’t even want to think what might have happened if she had been born at a time and place where government defined the limits for most insurance policies and set precedents on what would be covered. Would the life-saving procedures that saved her have been deemed cost-effective by policy makers deciding where to spend increasingly scarce tax dollars? [...]

Take cancer as one example. Compared to the U.S., breast cancer mortality is 9% higher in Canada (according to the government statistics of each country), 52% higher in Germany and 88% higher in the United Kingdom (according to studies published in Lancet Oncology). Prostate cancer mortality is 604% higher in Britain. [...]

The plain truth is that the American system is better at rewarding innovation and responding to consumer needs. But the history of government-led care is there for all to see. Are we doomed to repeat it?

Beutler correctly points out that the ‘government will death panel Americans’ meme has by now been thoroughly debunked — the “limits for most insurance companies” that Johnson is referring to are actually coverage minimums that states can expand upon — and notes that Carey or a child in her position could have benefited from the law’s new regulations that already prohibit insurers from discriminating against children with pre-existing conditions and eliminated lifetime and annual caps that often leave families with thousands in medical bills. Had her parents not received employer-based coverage, she could have found insurance in the temporary high-risk insurance pools that 12,400 Americans are now enrolled in and in 2014, her parents could buy a comprehensive family plan through a state-based exchange.

Johnson’s indictment of universal health systems around the world is equally pernicious. The United States does boast some of the best acute care in the world, but as Jonathan Cohn points out, “it’s hard to read the data as indictment of universal health care when the U.S. survival rate on other ailments isn’t so superior.” For example, “The Swedes are more likely than Americans to survive a diagnosis of cervical, ovarian, or skin cancer; the French are more likely to survive stomach cancer, Hodgkins disease, and non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Aussies, Brits, and Canadians do better on liver and kidney transplants.”

Countries with universal care also have better quality, access, efficiency, equity, and live healthier lives. And while health spending in the United States increased at more than twice the rate of countries like Canada, Australia, Italy, U.K., Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands, and Japan, America 50th out of 223 nations in life expectancy, with an average life span of 78.37 years, according to estimates from the CIA World Factbook. The United States is also “ranked 29th in the world in infant mortality, tied with Poland and Slovakia.” And so, Johnson gets it wrong. The ACA wouldn’t have killed Johnson’s daughter, but thousands of other uninsured babies would have died without it.