The New York Times editorial board debunked the “big myths” Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are “peddling about the Affordable Care Act and also their ill-conceived plans of what might replace it.” The board wrote that Trump and Cruz are “willing to mislead the public any way they can” to “trash the Affordable Care Act” by “inventing problems that don’t exist and proposing solutions that won’t help.”

Right-wing media have smeared Obamacare for years with baseless catastrophic predictions and falsehoods, and 2016 Republican presidential candidates have followed suit. That fearmongering has been stunningly wrong, and numerous reports have repeatedly highlighted the Affordable Care Act’s successes in bringing “historic increases in coverage.”

In an April 19 editorial, the Times’ editorial board explained that, contrary to Trump and Cruz’s misleading attempts to trash the Affordable Care Act, “the law has helped millions of Americans, especially low-wage workers … who previously struggled to pay for coverage.” From the Times’ editorial board:

“Disaster.” “Incredible economic burden.” “The biggest job-killer in this country.”

Central to the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz has been the claim that the Affordable Care Act has been a complete failure, and that the only way to save the country from this scourge is to replace it with something they design.

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Mr. Cruz claimed that “millions of Americans” had lost their health insurance because of the health reform law.

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Insurers did stop offering some plans after the law took effect, including those that didn’t provide required benefits like maternity care or that charged higher premiums to older or sicker people. But people with those plans had the opportunity to sign up for others. And over all, the law has drastically reduced the number of Americans who lack health insurance. According to the Census Bureau, the number of uninsured Americans dropped by 10 million between 2010, when the law passed, and 2014. While critics said employers might stop offering health insurance because of the law, three million people actually gained coverage through their employers between 2010 and 2014.

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Mr. Cruz has called the Affordable Care Act “the biggest job-killer in this country” and said “millions of Americans have lost their jobs, have been forced into part-time work” because of it. This is false. The unemployment rate has fallen since the law took effect, PolitiFact notes, as has the number of people working part time when they would rather work full time. A 2015 study using data from the Current Population Survey found that the law “had virtually no adverse effect on labor force participation, employment or usual hours worked per week through 2014.”

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[T]he biggest obstacle stopping insurers from setting up in more states is not regulation; it’s the difficulty of establishing a network of providers in a new market. And such a structure would destroy the longstanding ability of states to regulate health insurance for their populations. Some states, for instance, require coverage for infertility treatment and others have chosen not to. Allowing cross-border plans would encourage insurers to base themselves in low-regulation states, and the result might be a proliferation of poor-quality plans.

The Affordable Care Act is not perfect.

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But the law has helped millions of Americans, especially low-wage workers like cashiers, cooks and waiters who previously struggled to pay for coverage. In inventing problems that don’t exist and proposing solutions that won’t help, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz show that they don’t care about helping Americans get health care, which has never been their interest. They want to trash the Affordable Care Act, and they’re willing to mislead the public any way they can.