Fact checkers, like 9News, pointed out that “it’s true that millions of people with individual coverage got cancellation notices because their old plans didn’t meet the standards of Obamacare…. But getting one of these notices is not the same thing as losing insurance.”

In its critique of a Gardner ad, 9News explained:

By federal law, when they cancel a plan, insurance companies have to offer you an alternate plan if they want to stay in business. Of course, some of those alternate plans were more expensive and that caused trouble for people.

But this ad is trying to make you believe that all those people just became uninsured, which is just not the case. 

Bottom line: renewals were offered to the vast majority of people whose insurance policies were canceled, and new policies were offered to all. 

This didn’t stop Gardner from deftly presenting himself as an aggrieved citizen, accusing Udall of possible “abuse of power” for pushing back on the figures and claiming that he was forced to replace his own family’s insurance policy with an Obamacare plan that was “more costly, inferior,” going from a premium of $650 to $1,480 per month. 

But, to the consternation of multiple journalists, he never provided the details of his own plan (as in, what it covered or the amount of its deductible) so that the public could verify his statements and compare the benefits of his Obamacare policy and his previous plan. A premium $650/family of four was absurdly low.

“Sometimes the candidate doesn’t answer the question,” said then Denver Post Politics Editor Chuck Plunkett after Gardner refused to answer questions about his insurance plan. “That also tells you something about the candidate the voters should know.” 

So even Gardner’s personal story about Obamacare, like his other ferocious allegations about the law, was unverifiable at best, wild exaggeration or flat-out misinformation at worst. 

In 2014, 60% of Coloradans Opposed Obamacare

Throughout his 2014 Senate campaign, at a time when Coloradans opposed Obamacare by a 60% to 37% margin, Gardner continued promoting himself as the poster-child victim of the national healthcare law. It needed to be killed, he said, by any means available.  

And as he would continue to do in the coming years, Gardner did not offer alternatives that protected people with pre-existing conditions, and he provided no plan to provide health insurance coverage to Coloradans who would gain it in the coming years as Obamacare slowly reduced Colorado’s uninsured rate from 16% to 6%.

But, still, riding the anti-Obamacare and general anti-Obama sentiment that prevailed at the time, Gardner won a narrow victory over Udall in November, 2014, and became Colorado’s senator. 

“Obamacare was so unpopular at the time,” Jim Carpenter, who advised Udall in 2014, told the Colorado Times Recorder. “And that’s why it was a smart short-term strategy for the Republicans. It just wasn’t working for the Democrats to say, ‘Let’s fix [the ACA’s] flaws.’ That was frustrating. But not much was working in 2014, frankly.”

“It’s part of the story of Obamacare itself,” continued Carpenter, who’s the co-founder of Freestone Strategies and a longtime political strategist in Colorado. “You campaign on healthcare reform, which President Obama and the Democrats did [in 2008], and you implement something that’s really big. It doesn’t work perfectly.”

“So it was easy to take a political shot at Obamacare; Cory Gardner didn’t have to be substantive or particularly thoughtful,” said Carpenter. “He could just take the political shot. And a lot of people lost their seats both in 2010 and then in 2014, in part for their support of this.”

Thumb Down from McCain, Thumb Up from Gardner

During Gardner’s first year in the Senate, the U.S. Supreme Court seemed poised to strike down Obamacare, and Gardner, who’d quickly been elected to the Senate’s Republican leadership team, promised that Republicans would have an ACA replacement plan “ready to go” if the high court overturned the law.

But the Supreme Court upheld the ACA in 2015, leaving the status quo in place. That was until Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016. 

When the GOP suddenly controlled the White House along with the House and Senate in 2017, they had the power to kill Obamacare.

That’s when the climate Gardner faced around the ACA began to change in a big way. 

In April 2017, for the first time since Gallup began polling on the topic, a majority of Americans approved of the national health care law, with a major leap in favor-ability occurring in the previous five months as more attention was focused on what would be lost if Republicans succeeded in repealing Obamacare. This came even as Gardner continued to call Obamacare a “disaster for the American people.”

For the previous seven years, GOP votes to kill the ACA had become so ritualistic as to be ignored. But now with increased scrutiny of the ramifications of losing Obamacare came increased support for the law, under which 500,000 people in Colorado now got health insurance. 

In May 2017, the Republican-controlled House passed a bill to repeal and replace the ACA. It would have left 22 million Americans without health insurance in the ensuing ten years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). About 400,000 Coloradans would lose their coverage within five years, experts predicted. 

Gardner, who had promised to soften the blow on folks who’d lose health insurance under the legislation, was one of 13 GOP senators assigned to draft the Senate version of the House bill. Gardner used this role, even though it was never clear what he actually did, to position himself as protecting the Medicaid expansion under the ACA, which Colorado had successfully adopted in 2013 under Gov. John Hickenlooper (D-CO), extending coverage to some 400,000 Coloradans. Upending the Medicaid expansion population would arguably have been the most visible disruption under the three GOP repeal bills, and Gardner earned headlines suggesting he was not completely hostile to Medicaid but instead wanting to put Medicaid on a “glide path” to an eventual rollback.

Gardner also insisted for months that he was undecided on how he’d vote, up until the last morning before the Senate took action on the final bills, and he asked for a second opinion on the CBO estimate that so many millions would be left uninsured.

After much drama, and three measures ranging for outright repeal of the ACA to the narrower “skinny repeal” that was supposed squeak by with a bare majority in the Senate, Gardner voted for everything the party leadership put forward. 

The last proposal, the so-called “skinny repeal,” lost thanks to defections from three Republicans, including Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who’d just returned to the Senate after receiving a diagnosis of brain cancer. 

Leading up to all three Senate votes, Gardner wouldn’t tell reporters where he stood, but his support for the Obamacare-repeal measures was never seriously considered in doubt, in part, most analysts agreed, due to his leadership position in the Senate, tying him closely to Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Gardner and his fellow Republicans never produced a concrete replacement plan that came close to matching Obamacare’s breadth of coverage and benefits, such as protections for people (over 2 million in Colorado) with pre-existing conditions, provisions allowing young adults (40,000 in Colorado) to stay on their parents’ insurance plans, mandatory preventative care (checkups, mammograms) for 2,519,638 Coloradans who might not otherwise have free access, and more. Gardner repeatedly said he wanted an Obamacare replacement that would lower insurance costs, but studies showed that premiums would increase at a higher rate under the GOP proposals. 

And so, by the end of 2017, the seven-year GOP effort to repeal Obamacare died, at least in Congress. 

After Failure in Congress, Gardner Backed Trump Efforts to Weaken ACA in Courts

But that didn’t stop Gardner from continuing to attack the health care law throughout 2018 and into 2019 and continuing to  back Trump’s initiatives to weaken it, including the president’s order allowing the sale of so-called junk insurance that would skirt the ACA’s guarantee that insurance companies cannot deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

Gardner also appears to support a lawsuit heading toward the U.S. Supreme Court that again aims to kill Obamacare outright. When The Hill newspaper asked Gardner last year his position on the lawsuit, Gardner said, “That’s the court’s decision. If the Democrats want to stand for an unconstitutional law, I guess that’s their choice.” He is not part of a Senate resolution that would force Trump to stop supporting the lawsuit.

Obamacare Now a Liability for Gardner

Gardner, who did not return a call to discuss this article, goes into the election year with the popularity of Obamacare near its highest point since it was enacted, with 52% of adults viewing it favorably.