Lies of my President, Revisited

Recall President Barack Obama’s original lie, from mid-July 2009:

If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor.  Period.  If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan.  Period.

Then, when the insurance cancelation notices went out, and Obamacare “insurance” plans didn’t include our doctors in their networks, he lied about his lie.  He had this, for instance, through his Press Secretary Jay Carney:

What the president said and what everybody said all along is that there are going to be changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act to create minimum standards of coverage, minimum services that every insurance plan has to provide.  So it’s true that there are existing healthcare plans on the individual market that don’t meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act.

So it’s “If I like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor.  Maybe.  If I like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan.  Maybe.”

Then he lied with his sham apology:

I am sorry that they, you know, are finding themselves in this situation, based on assurances they got from me.

No apology for either of his prior lies, just regret that all those folks took him at his word.

And Obama thought his lies were funny at the time he made them:

So after I signed the bill, I looked around to see if there any—(laughter)—asteroids falling or—(applause)—some cracks opening up in the Earth.  (Laughter.)  It turned out it was a nice day.  (Laughter.)  Birds were chirping.  Folks were strolling down the Mall.  People still have their doctors.

Five million Americans, and counting don’t have their health care plans, either.

After receiving a letter from her insurer that her plan was being discontinued, Deborah Persico…found a comparable plan on the city’s new health insurance exchange. But her monthly premium, now $297, would be $165 higher, and her maximum out-of-pocket costs would double.

That means she could end up paying at least $5,000 more a year than she does now.

She’s not alone.  In California alone,

Hundreds of thousands…who purchase their own health insurance are bracing to pay more for their plans, as the cost of the federal health care overhaul lands harder on middle-class customers.

The Daily Caller estimates that the total number of Americans about whom Obama is sorry for having believed him will run to 129 million.

Fifty-three Democrats and two Independents in the Senate actively supported Obama in these lies until the cancelations started rolling in.  Now some of those are worried, not about the losses of all these Americans, but about their own political necks.  Two hundred Democrats in the House Actively supported Obama in these lies until the cancelations started rolling in.  Now some of those are worried, not about the losses of all these Americans, but about their own political necks.

And now Obama wants—dishonestly, again—to change the Obamacare law (the law of the land, remember) by Executive Order to force insurance companies to reinstate all those cancelled policies and to extend existing ones.  For a whole year.

Remember that during primary and election season this summer and fall.

More on ObamaMart

HealthCare.gov thinks it’s made an improvement: now we can browse—sort of—some notional health “insurance” plans and their notional premiums.  The images below (because the technology is smarter than I am, so I can’t meld them into the single image that exists at HealthCare.gov/how-much-will-marketplace-insurance-cost/) show just how meaningless this “improvement” is.

And

As you can see, the ObamaMart still is withholding any sort of idea of actual costs—explicitly, you don’t get to see deductibles and copays, and you only get to see “premiums” for two age groups—which lump together too many characteristics for these made-up numbers to be taken seriously.

We still have to give our personally identifying information to the ObamaMart doorman, we still have to open an “account” before we can get into the store and poke the shelves.

The IRS knows how to do tables of options based on income.  Adding options based on health conditions—the major factors, like heart disease history, smoking, weight vs height, and so on—for the five plan categories would make a table bigger, perhaps more complex (it might even—the horror!—require more than one table), but it’s eminently doable.  And Americans aren’t as dumb as the Progressives in the White House and HHS think—we can keep up with such a table or set of tables.

This page of notions is just mendacious.

Progressives and “Disruptive”

This is what President Barack Obama had to say (besides his sham “apology,” I mean) in his NBC News interview last week:

I think we, in good faith, have been trying to take on a health care system that has been broken for a very long time.  And what we’ve been trying to do is to change it in the least disruptive way possible.  …  There were folks on the right who said, “Let’s just get rid of– you know, employer deductions for health care.  And give people– a tax credit and they can go buy their own health care in their own market.”  That would have been more disruptive.

Because letting free Americans choose for themselves instead of accepting the diktats of Progressive Government is disruptive.  Sure.

Disruptive for whom, exactly?

More Lies

…of my President.

If you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, what we said was you could keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law’s passed.  So we wrote into the Affordable Care Act you are grandfathered in on that plan.  But if the insurance company changes it, then what we’re saying is they have got to change it to a higher standard.

That’s what President Barack Obama is claiming now that his original lie has been exposed, with 2 million Americans, and counting, losing their existing insurance policies.  Now he’s lying about his lie, as with this example, made at Faneuil Hall in Boston last Monday.

No, Mr President.  You said no such thing.  What you did say was

I you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan.  Period.

No caveats.  No “except if we change our minds later.”

Further, aside from your current lie denying that you said your earlier lie, your new lie also ignores the fact that your Obamacare requires the insurance company to change their existing plans so as to meet your standard—which means that plan no longer meets your grandfather criteria.  I’ve already been over your arrogance in presuming to Know Better what is adequate insurance than the person who’s buying it, whose money it is being spent on it.

There’s also this new lie about HealthCare.gov, Obama’s new ObamaMart.  Obama is claiming, through his Press Secretary, Jay Carney, that consumers who are having trouble getting through that HealthCare.gov Web site now have their problems solved: they can send in paper applications, or they can get on the phone to a “trained operator standing by” and complete an application in all of 25 minutes.

What Obama is carefully ignoring with this new one is that that paper application, and that telephone application, both have to be entered into the system—through HealthCare.gov.

Folks need to remember this over the primary season this summer and then again this fall.

Who Gets to Decide?

White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer claimed Sunday on ABC’s This Week that millions of Americans lost insurance their insurance policies because ObamaCare had deemed them inadequate.

[I]f the president were to allow people to have those plans…or insurance companies to keep selling barebones plans…he’d be violating even more important promise to the American people, that everyone would have a guarantee to access of quality…health insurance[.]

Ex-Obama advisor Dr Ezekiel Emanuel (and University of Pennsylvania Vice Provost) said much the same thing on Sunday’s Fox News Sunday.

WALLACE: Dr. Emanuel, simple question—why does Betsy Tadder need you or President Obama telling her what insurance she needs?

EMANUEL: For two reasons: first of all, if she goes in and that insurance doesn’t cover enough…

WALLACE: But she likes her plan.

EMANUEL: But we’re cost shifting.

Plainly our Know Better Progressive Government is the only one qualified to decide.  Not us, not about our insurance, not about our money.