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As the disaster that is the ObamaCare rollout continues let's take a couple of looks at how the spin is in. First up is Diane Feinstein (D-CA) with CBS's Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation:
(if you don't have time for the 3 minute video, scroll down for the money quote)
SCHIEFFER: The president said in the beginning that one thing was that if you liked the health care program you had, you could keep it. We now know there was debate within the administration before he said that as to whether that was actually a promise that could be kept. Should the president not have made that statement?
FEINSTEIN: Well, as I understand it, you can keep it up to the time — and I hope this is correct, but this is what I’ve been told — up to the time the bill was enacted, and after that, it’s a different story. That part of it, if true, was never made clear.
Correction, DiFi. It was made perfectly clear. The President, out on the campaign trail and even after he won his second term was using good ol'-fashioned 'Merican plain-speak when he told all of us without qualifications or reservations that if we liked our current healthcare plan... we could keep it, no questions asked. This has now turned out to be one big fat lie that the administration knew about but for obvious political reasons had to stick to this lie.
And here's the New York Times doing some furious spinning of their own in an editorial piece on Sunday:
Congressional Republicans have stoked consumer fears and confusion with charges that the health care reform law is causing insurers to cancel existing policies and will force many people to pay substantially higher premiums next year for coverage they don’t want. That, they say, violates President Obama’s pledge that if you like the insurance you have, you can keep it.
Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that. By law, insurers cannot continue to sell policies that don’t provide the minimum benefits and consumer protections required as of next year. So they’ve sent cancellation notices to hundreds of thousands of people who hold these substandard policies. (At issue here are not the 149 million people covered by employer plans, but the 10 million to 12 million people who buy policies directly on the individual market.)
(italics, ours)
No, what Mr. Obama clearly did is what the folks in Placentia, California call lying.
And what the Times did in those two paragraphs was pretty clever. It's as if the Republicans backed the President into a corner and that he was forced to lie to combat all those, um, lies coming from the Republicans and, more precisely, the wacko-bird/tea party wing of the party who have happened to be spot-on with their warnings against the hazards of this pitiful law.
In the last half of the second paragraph, we see the dominant narrative with respect to the cancellations: your current policy sucks, so the President is doing you a favor by cancelling it and shoving you into a plan that is better for you. You're welcome.
Funny. We did not hear that line of reasoning prior to October 1st when healthcare.gov went live.
No matter. What has always bothered us most about this law aside from the fact it was unworkable and financially unsustainable was that it represented an unwarranted and unnecessary intrusion into one's personal, financial and medical matters and choices (the fact that the IRS is the enforcement wing of this regime ought to chill one to the core). It is, at its core, an existential threat to our freedom and liberty.
It's soft authoritarianism (it's for your own good, trust us) and speaking of regimes, here's Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) doubling down on that mentality with respect to the cancellation lie:
“I suppose he could have added a caveat that if you have a plan you like, you can keep it, as long as it fits into this new regime that we are building for America. To say you can keep that, that’s not really right…there’s a lot of gray area there."
New regigme. Charmed, we're sure. Look no further, gang, for the perfect distillation of the statist/collectivist mindset: you're too stupid to figure out your own business, so we'll do it for you.
* We have it on good authority that this is not a PhotoShop job and that someone did indeed "gift" that to Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius at a townhall event over the weekend. Awesome.
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1 comment:
I know the destruction of the insurance industry is politically correct, but we have now uncovered exactly how the insurance companies were swindled into supporting their own destruction...advanceable tax credits.
The Obama Administration and the Democrat party lied to everyone involved about every part of the law.
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