How ever the White House and the Democrats want to spin it, President Obama lied about the Affordable Care Act – and he wasn’t the only one. But it’s “his” plan and legacy that are on trial now.
Denying that he ever said the line is ridiculous and just makes liberals look worse. It has been fact-checked repeatedly even by liberal news media. The first appearance of the empty promises came at a town hall on August 15, 2009 when the President said, “I just want to be completely clear about this; I keep on saying this but somehow folks aren’t listening — if you like your health care plan, you keep your health care plan. Nobody is going to force you to leave your health care plan.”
Less than a year later, he said essentially the same thing at a speech on March 25, 2010 in Iowa City, Iowa. Speaking of those who were skeptical and cynical of his health reform President Obama said, “They’ll have to finally acknowledge this isn’t a government takeover of our health care system. They’ll see that if Americans like their doctor, they’ll be keeping their doctor. You like your plan? You’ll be keeping your plan. No one is taking that away from you.” If you’re curious, none of this is out of context and full texts for these speeches are available at the White House website.
Without beating a dead horse, this is thoroughly inaccurate or, as the Democrats would say about a Republican president, he lied. There is no caveat stated in any of these remarks related to grandfather provisions or referring to existing medical plans that must meet some set standard required by the new law. It says, very clearly, no one would lose their existing coverage.
So how can anyone say he did not lie about it? Making excuses for lying politicians – on either side of the aisle – does not an honest man make. It’s no secret I’ve never really been a fan of this president, nor the last one either for that matter. But regardless of your loyalties, to deny that he misled the public is just feigning ignorance. He didn’t misspeak or stumble on his phrasing, and leaving out a vital piece of information is a lie by omission, so Dems need to stop trying to defend it.
The Affordable Care Act is a badly written piece of legislation that was pushed through to meet a political agenda rather than to benefit the population as a whole. Overall, I agree with the concept that we need some way to cover those people who cannot afford health care. But at the same time, those already paying their own way shouldn’t be punished by having their current policies systematically cancelled just to meet a set of arbitrary requirements established to force enrollment in the government’s new insurance monopoly.
Speaking of monopolies, wouldn’t it have made sense to have something in the law requiring premium caps and policy cost regulations? What about some kind of legislation that would control the pricing of health care services and keep the cost lower in the first place? One would think our government is more concerned with the expensive cost of a pack of bubble gum than the outrageous price of a critical medical test.
Lobbyists from the medical and insurance industries are extremely powerful, far more so than the average small business owner or individual health insurance consumer. Since most legislators are in the pocket of some major lobbying group, it would be financial suicide for them go against anything as massive as the insurance industry.
The only practical solution to this issue is to correct the problems within the content of the Affordable Care Act; not by presidential mandate, but through the legislative system. Congress needs to re-open the letter of the law and grab an eraser. Force the insurance companies and hospitals to lower costs and let people keep their insurance. Bad legislation only gets worse and wastes taxpayer dollars instead of more efficiently allocating that money to more productive purposes.
The Jamestown Comet 