The president is trying to reinvent the history of his you-can-keep-it promise on health care.
By Ron Fournier
It might not seem possible that President Obama could do more harm to
his credibility and the public's faith in government than misleading
Americans about health insurance reform. But he can. The president is
now misleading the public about his deception.
In a speech Monday night to his political team, Obama said:
"Now, 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 can keep it if it hasn't changed since the law passed."
No, no, no, no, no--that's not what the Obama administration said. What it said was:
"That means that no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what."– President Obama, speech to the American Medical Association, June 15, 2009, during the debate over health insurance reform.
"And if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn't happened yet. It won't happen in the future."– Obama, remarks in Portland, Ore., April 1, 2010, after the bill was signed into law.
These quotes are courtesy of Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, who gave Obama four Pinocchios
for the you-can-keep-it whopper, repeated countless times by Obama.
"The president's statements were sweeping and unequivocal—and made both
before and after the bill became law," Kessler wrote.
"The White House now cites technicalities to avoid admitting that he
went too far in his repeated pledge, which, after all, is one of the
most famous statements of his presidency."
What
Obama told supporters Monday is what he should have told the public all
along. "So we wrote into the Affordable Care Act, you're grandfathered
in on that plan. But if the insurance company changes it, then what
we're saying is they've got to change it to a higher standard. They've
got to make it better, they've got to improve the quality of the plan
they are selling," Obama said at an Organizing for Action event. "That's
part of the promise that we made too. That's why we went out of our way
to make sure that the law allowed for grandfathering."
"If
we had allowed these old plans to be downgraded, or sold to new
enrollees once the law had already passed, then we would have broken an
even more important promise--making sure Americans gain access to
health care that doesn't leave them one illness away from financial
ruin," Obama said Monday. "The bottom line is that we are making the
insurance market better for everybody and that's the right thing to
do."
Watch the video
of Obama reinventing history with the "what-we-said-was" construction.
Notice how he is looking at notes. Remarkably, this was not an
off-the-cuff remark; it was written, reviewed, and approved by senior
White House officials, then recited by the president. An orchestrated
deceit.
Why
didn't Obama add their caveats during his reelection campaign? His
aides debated it. Some argued that the president had to shoot straight
with the public. Others feared that the public wouldn't understand the
nuance and GOP rival Mitt Romney would use it to his advantage.
The
cynics won. The truth was buried. And the man who promised to run the
most transparent administration in history participated in a lie.
On
history's scale of deception, this one leaves a light footprint. Worse
lies have been told by worse presidents, leading to more severe
consequences, and you could argue that withholding a caveat is more a
sin of omission. But this president is toying with a fragile commodity:
his credibility. Once Americans stop believing in Obama, they will stop
listening to him. They won't trust government to manage health care. And
they will wonder what happened to the reform-minded leader who promised
never to lie to them.
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