Watch this town hall go sideways as Florida Republican warns seniors about Obamacare 'death panels'

It’s not too hard to comprehend that lots of folks might get mighty angry if you threaten to take away their healthcare coverage without offering a plan to replace it.

At town hall meetings across the country, GOP leaders in some of the staunchest Republican strongholds are getting a dose of their own medicine from outraged members of the public who actually need healthcare services facilitated by the Affordable Care Act, which Republican lawmakers began rolling back last month.

As Fusion’s Katie McDonough writes:

The Republican alternative to the individual mandate requiring everyone to have insurance is to return to a failed model of pooling very sick people together as a way to isolate the costs from the insurance market. What that’s meant in the past are premiums that are sometimes 250% above market averages and deductibles high enough to be virtually unmeetable. That’s not comprehensive coverage, and lawmakers should be able to answer for that.

But instead of answering those legitimate concerns, a Florida Republican official on Saturday tried to bamboozle a group of senior citizens at a town hall into believing Obamacare included “death panels”—a falsehood that was debunked eight years ago.

Bill Akins, secretary of the Pasco County, FL Republican executive committee, told the audience:

Here’s the problems I have with the Affordable Health Care Act. Number one, there’s a provision in there that anyone over the age of 74 has to go before what is effectively a death panel. Yes, they do. Yes, they do. It’s in there, folks.

The thing is, no it’s not. And members of the audience—many of them over 70—didn’t take kindly to being falsely told they would face some dystopian death panel thanks to Obama.

Just watch how they responded:

 
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