Remember when Obama and his apparatchiks said that if you like your current health insurance plan, you could keep it under ObamaCare? Well, he was lying. It turns out that the false claim — repeated often by the president and parroted by the establishment press — was not true for most people in the individual market. Neither was it true for millions of Americans who receive insurance through their employers. Even worse, perhaps: Despite the frequent lies, the administration has known all of that for years.
Now, even his die-hard fans at NBC News, formerly MSNBC.com, are calling out Obama for misleading America in an article that has since gone viral. The administration was finally forced to admit it, too — probably because it became impossible to deceive the country any longer. Meanwhile, the public is on the verge of exploding as literally millions of insurance cancellation letters are sent out from Florida to California and everywhere in between.
“We will keep this promise to the American people,” Obama declared in the summer of 2009 as he was trying to sell the radical overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system to a skeptical public. “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your healthcare plan, you will be able to keep your healthcare plan. Period.”
Shortly after those lies, Obama was at it again. “Let me be exactly clear about what healthcare reform means to you,” he claimed, falsely, at a rally in New Jersey. “First of all, if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.”
The deception was repeated over and over again by Obama and his cohorts — even as late as last year. Incredibly, the WhiteHouse.gov website says: “If you like your plan you can keep it and you don’t have to change a thing due to the health care law.” As of October 29, that bogus claim was still close to the top of the official White House site on ObamaCare.
The lie, however, has now been definitively exposed — as many as tens of millions who liked their healthcare plans just fine are in the process of losing them. In essence, ObamaCare was sold to the American people using fraud. The president and lawmakers who rammed the unpopular bill through Congress claimed on countless occasions that people could keep their plans. They can’t. And the administration has known for years. If a private company was selling anything using such tactics — let alone a multi-trillion dollar “train wreck” — the fraudsters would almost certainly end up in jail.
Now, the lies are even being admitted openly as if they are no big deal. “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,” acknowledged White House spokesman Jay Carney on Monday about the millions of plans that are being cancelled under the controversial new healthcare regime.
According to multiple sources cited by NBC News, which reported the story under the headline “Obama administration knew millions could not keep their health insurance,” the president has known for at least three years that most Americans in the individual health-insurance market would be losing their plans. The numbers speak for themselves.
Analysts involved in the scheme suggested that between 50 percent and 75 percent of consumers in the individual market either already have received or will soon be receiving cancellation notices. One expert predicted the number could be as high as 80 percent. Thanks to all of the controversial mandates about what must be included in ObamaCare-compliant plans, many of those whose policies are cancelled will be forced to purchase more expensive plans against their will.
Perhaps the most alarming element of the saga is that the administration has known all of that for years — probably from the beginning. The legislation claimed that plans in effect before March 23, 2010 could be “grandfathered” even if they were not Obama administration-approved. The nightmarish regulatory regime accompanying ObamaCare, however, makes clear that if any part of a policy was changed, it would no longer be legal to keep it. Even tiny changes in deductibles, benefits, or other matters ensure that the policies cannot be kept.
The regulations themselves acknowledge that. According to NBC News, buried deep within the regulations developed in mid-2010 is an estimate showing that “because of normal turnover” in the individual insurance market, between “40 to 67 percent” of customers would be prohibited from keeping their policies — even if they liked them.
Owing to the fact that many policies have been changed since the “grandfather” date, the regulations continue, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.” In other words, the administration has known for years that it was lying, yet as late as 2012, Obama claimed: “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”
Prominent healthcare consultant Robert Laszewski with Health Policy and Strategy Associates put it bluntly. “This says that when they made the promise, they knew half the people in this market outright couldn’t keep what they had and then they wrote the rules so that others couldn’t make it either,” he told NBC News. In other words, they were not telling the truth, which is also known as lying.
Laszewski estimated that 80 percent of people with insurance plans in the individual market will be losing the plans they liked. Instead, the estimated 16 million consumers will be forced — under penalty of federal extortion — to purchase more expensive, ObamaCare-compliant plans. Those more expensive plans are mandated by the ACA to offer a wide range of “benefits” that people who were happy with their insurance probably do not need or want: birth control, “mental-health services,” and more.
So, at the barrel of a federal gun, Americans will be forced to buy products they do not need or want from mega-corporations with powerful lobbyists who backed ObamaCare. As respected trends forecaster Gerald Celente put it, the ObamaCare arrangement represents another example of the “merger of state and corporate power,” also known historically as fascism. The people are the victims.
The incessantly repeated claims about being able to “keep your doctor” are also starting to fall apart. Across the country, as part of the radical “reforms,” health-insurance providers are kicking doctors out of their programs because of ObamaCare. In New York, for example, where almost a million elderly people are in the Medicare Advantage program, numerous doctors are being dropped from the plans, the New York Post reported.
The public, of course, is outraged. “Obama had said I could keep my doctor. Now they’re doing away with my doctor,” fumed Alfred Gargiulio, who suffered from cerebral palsy and has seen the same doctor for two decades. “They kicked him out! After 20 years, that’s not right.” Countless similar horror stories are emerging across the country, and more will undoubtedly be hitting the headlines soon.
Of course, the White House and its taxpayer-funded and private sector propagandists have been busy fiendishly trying to spin the lies. The largely discredited PolitiFact, for instance, rated Obama’s promise about people being able to keep their existing plans as “half true.” Obama spokesman Jay Carney was trying hard, too. “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,” he claimed when asked directly about the lies this week.
Despite the administration’s best efforts, however, the deception and the ongoing scheme to conceal it are only becoming increasingly ludicrous. In the individual market, some 16 million out of 19 million consumers are expected to lose their plans. Under employer-sponsored coverage, millions more will be losing their coverage, too. Numerous other problems — including soaring costs — are already becoming apparent as well.
In the end, ObamaCare might be such a colossal disaster that the establishment may just “have” to implement full-blown socialized medicine to “fix” it. Capitalism, as usual, will get the blame, at least if politicians have their way. The only possible benefit of the horrific “train wreck” currently unfolding is that the American people might — just might — finally realize that government is not the solution, it is the problem. After all, if government is incapable of building a website that works or of keeping a simple promise, how can politicians possibly be trusted with your healthcare?
Photo of President Barack Obama: AP Images
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, politics, and more. He can be reached at [email protected].
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