During an appearance on CSPAN’s Washington Journal Thursday morning, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) claimed that the Affordable Care Act would increase the number of Americans without health insurance, dismissing analysis showing that 30 million people would gain coverage under the law.

“Everybody in America has access to health care, and we even have many many organizations that make sure they fill those holes,” King explained. “The effort was to increase the number of insured in America and that number does not look like it will increase under Obamacare”:

KING: We’re actually going to get more people uninsured under Obamacare and this creates the foundation for a one-size-fits-all federally-run socialized medicine system. We’re not completely there and I think we are a lot better off to let the free markets do this and encourage people to be personally responsible.

Watch it:

King’s analysis of health policy couldn’t be more wrong. While organizations and hospitals do provide emergency services to uninsured Americans, the cost of that uncompensated care is shifted to private premium payers, resulting in higher health care spending system-wide. Obamacare accepts King’s premise of encouraging personal responsibility and will require able-bodied citizens to pay for their own health care expenses beginning in 2014.

During the interview, King also reiterated his opposition to requiring insurers to provide health care coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and said that Republicans should repeal the health care law in its entirety without preserving its popular provisions. This position puts him at odds with Republican leaders, who are drafting a plan to maintain aspects of the law that allow young people to stay on their parents health care plans and outlaw discrimination against sick people.

Rep. Steve King (R-IA), the same congressman who thinks states have a right to ban contraception, has revived an anti-abortion bill that is destined to die in the Senate. King has reintroduced his bill to “prohibit federal tele-health grants from going to clinics and doctors who use video-conferencing technology to prescribe the abortion medication mifepristone, also known as RU-486.” So far, the bill has 47 co-sponsors.

The Senate killed the same proposal in October after the House passed it as part of an agriculture bill, so it is likely the same thing will happen again.

When he introduced the measure on Thursday, King said his proposal was about stopping Planned Parenthood from providing what he has called “robo-Skype abortions“:

King said these “telemedicine abortions” help Planned Parenthood save costs by getting the same result as a surgical abortion, but “without the overhead costs.” But King said evidence is mounting that the morning-after pill, RU-486, is dangerous to women.

“Eight percent of women who take the abortion drug known as RU-486 require surgical intervention to complete their abortion,” he said. “This new practice leaves those women at grave risk and should never be supported with taxpayer dollars.”

The problem is that King’s view of telemedicine abortion services as a way to lower overhead costs is completely inaccurate. For one, Planned Parenthood officials have confirmed that abortion medication is a very small part of the telemedicine services the organization offers.

And studies have shown that medication abortions with a doctor connected by teleconference is safe, and it expands health care options for rural women who otherwise would find it difficult to terminate their pregnancies. And as states like Wisconsin block these procedures, researchers have found that there is no reason to restrict medication abortion services via telemedicine. Once again, King is using scare tactics to push for unnecessary policies that would hurt women’s access to health care.

FORT DODGE, Iowa – The right-wing social conservative group The FAMiLY Leader is pushing Iowa Republicans to restrict any state tax dollars from going to Planned Parenthood. While Planned Parenthood does not get state money for abortions, “it does get at least $6 million in state tax dollars as reimbursement for providing birth control and reproductive health exams to poor women.” And now, because the Iowa Republicans are plotting to take that away, women are making their voices heard.

An elderly woman from central Iowa had harsh words for Rep. Steve King (R-IA) at a town hall meeting Tuesday, reprimanding the congressman for his attacks on the women’s health provider Planned Parenthood. During his time in Congress, King has been one of the most outspoken critics of Planned Parenthood for providing abortion services. The vast majority of Planned Parenthood’s services — 97 percent — don’t involve abortion, but other women’s health needs like mammograms, cervical cancer screenings, and STI tests.

The constituent, Shirley Grant, assailed King for wanting to defund Planned Parenthood and make it harder for women to get health care and “take charge of their destiny.” Said Grant, “I find it very offensive that men think they can tell women what to do with their own life.”

GRANT: When women want pro-choice and want to take charge of their destiny, you and your cohorts want to take funding away from Planned Parenthood. My daughter says, “throw out the word ‘birth control,’ Mom. Planned Parenthood isn’t that.” She says it’s for hormone replacement and that means you use those pills for many, many, many different areas of women’s lives. I find it very offensive that men think they can tell women what to do with their own life.

Watch the exchange, as well as Grant’s reaction afterwards:

ThinkProgress spoke with King on Monday about whether right-wing rhetoric may have played any part in motivating the bombing this week of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Wisconsin. Though King wasn’t familiar with the incident, he shrugged off the idea that Republican attacks bore any responsibility, saying his main concern was for the “unborn babies. That’s where our focus needs to be.”

Republican women like Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) are stepping in to defend the vital services provided by Planned Parenthood. “The preventive health care [that] they’re doing, we need to provide those services, absolutely,” she told MSNBC last month.

Republicans have a lot of reasons why the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, even if most of them don’t hold water. That means, every now and then, opponents of the law have to trot out theories that have already been ruled meritless.

Rep. Steve King did just that in a town hall meeting in Le Mars, Iowa on Monday. King, who opposes even some of the most popular provisions of the law, claimed that its requirement for all Americans to obtain insurance is unconstitutional because some Americans never, ever pay for health care:

Most advocates for Obamacare are arguing that, whether or not you have health insurance, you’re engaging in interstate commerce, because sooner or later, whether you actually go to the doctor or not, somebody’s gonna haul you to the emergency room and then somebody else is going to have to pay for it. So that’s the argument that compels you to buy insurance? I’d say that doesn’t fit the interstate commerce definition that I know. And that argument came before the Supreme Court.

What i’ve said is that, in every decade, in every state, there have always been babies that were born, lived, and died, and some of them a long and healthy life, without ever using a dollar worth [sic] of health care expenditures. That would mean that they didn’t engage in interstate commerce with regard to health care.

Watch:

King has made this argument before to attack the health care law, and it has been rejected. In an opinion upholding the law, conservative Sixth Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton wrote, “Even dramatic attempts to protect one’s health and minimize the need for health care will not always be successful, and the health care market is characterized by unpredictable and unavoidable needs for care. The ubiquity and unpredictability of the need for medical care is born out by the statistics. More than eighty percent of adults nationwide visited a doctor or other health care professional one or more times in 2009.”

-Zachary Bernstein