By William Voegeli
In June 2009, as health-care reform was being debated vigorously across the country, President Obama told the American Medical Association’s convention that, whatever the provisions of the health-care bill he would sign into law ultimately included, “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.”
After theAffordable Care Act lurched into effect in 2013, it became clear the president meant to say that if you like your doctor and health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep them . . . footnote. And, as you’d expect from a former editor of the Harvard Law Review, that footnote has turned out to be as long and convoluted as a Russian novel.
When people who did like their health-care plans started receiving notices of cancellation or enormous rate increases, Obama’s defenders tried to qualify the original promise, which Obama had made repeatedly while campaigning, first for president and then for enactment of new health-care policies. Economist Jared Bernstein, who worked in the White House in 2009, said a better formulation would have been, “If you like your plan and it doesn’t get significantly worse such that it’s out of sync with what we’re trying to do here, you can keep it.” In fact, he argued, because “such nuances were clear at the time” — which is not how nuances typically operate — Obama’s veracity about his proposals’ consequences was not in question.
The New York Times editorial page took the same position: The president “clearly misspoke” when he promised that people could keep health-insurance policies they liked, but the controversy over that pledge was “overblown.” After the sanitizing “misspoke” set off a controversy of its own, the paper’s “public editor” prodded chief editorialist Andrew Rosenthal, who allowed that “clearly wrong” or “clearly weren’t true” might also have been fair characterizations of Obama’s promises.
In the main, however, those who spoke up for Obama and Obamacare chose toplay offense, not defense. Salon’s Brian Beutler preferred to consider the Obama pledge “a failure to think through the dangers of being so categorical,” but acknowledged that it could have been a Platonic “noble lie.” Obama’s belief that “he had to lie for the greater good” was justified since Republicans had told much worse lies about how Obamacare was just a “stepping stone to single-payer.”
The American Prospect’s Steve Erickson judged Obama more severely than Beutler did: “This is the first time that reasonable people have caught the president telling an explicitly incontestable untruth” (itself an appraisal reasonable people might contest). But Erickson was even more severe regarding “those who so often have said so many preposterous things about [Obama],” since the president’s conservative detractors are, in a world that includes al-Qaeda and Kim Jong Un, “the worst enemies anyone can have.”
The Century Foundation’s Michael Cohen cast his net even wider, arguing that it would have been better if Obama had told the truth, but that the president really had no choice because Americans “can’t handle the truth.” Admitting that there would be some losers under Obamacare, as well as inevitable disruptions from an undertaking so ambitious, would have “made the path to reform that much politically harder to traverse,” rendering such candor impossible. “Voters want progress without sacrifice or inconvenience. Seemingly the only path to change is telling voters what they want to hear.”
Such resigned cynicism is, of course, exactly what Barack Obama was supposed to deliver us from. “Hope and Change” meant hoping for that change. At the Iowa Democratic party’s Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner in November 2007, Obama gave a speech so well received it propelled him to victory in the Iowa caucuses, then to winning the presidential nomination and election. The candidate declared, “Telling the American people what we think they want to hear, instead of telling the American people what they need to hear, just won’t do.” Democrats, he said, have “always made the biggest difference in the lives of the American people . . . when we summoned the entire nation to a common purpose — a higher purpose.”
And that’s where things become complicated: Summoning the entire nation to a higher purpose often requires telling people what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear. What people wanted to hear was that the higher purpose of guaranteeing “quality, affordable health care for every American,” to use Obama’s words, could be had easily and painlessly. And it turned out that this historic goal was surprisingly attainable. “Most of this plan,” the president told Congress in a September 2009 address on health-care reform, “can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health-care system, a system that is currently full of waste and abuse.” Giving millions of uninsured Americans health insurance, and improving coverage for millions more who already had insurance, not only wouldn’t increase the federal deficit, but was “a step we must take if we hope to bring down our deficit in the years to come,” Obama had explained earlier that year.
(parts 2 and 3 to come...must read material; use link for entire piece now)
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372344/print
After the
When people who did like their health-care plans started receiving notices of cancellation or enormous rate increases, Obama’s defenders tried to qualify the original promise, which Obama had made repeatedly while campaigning, first for president and then for enactment of new health-care policies. Economist Jared Bernstein, who worked in the White House in 2009, said a better formulation would have been, “If you like your plan and it doesn’t get significantly worse such that it’s out of sync with what we’re trying to do here, you can keep it.” In fact, he argued, because “such nuances were clear at the time” — which is not how nuances typically operate — Obama’s veracity about his proposals’ consequences was not in question.
The New York Times editorial page took the same position: The president “clearly misspoke” when he promised that people could keep health-insurance policies they liked, but the controversy over that pledge was “overblown.” After the sanitizing “misspoke” set off a controversy of its own, the paper’s “public editor” prodded chief editorialist Andrew Rosenthal, who allowed that “clearly wrong” or “clearly weren’t true” might also have been fair characterizations of Obama’s promises.
In the main, however, those who spoke up for Obama and Obamacare chose to
The American Prospect’s Steve Erickson judged Obama more severely than Beutler did: “This is the first time that reasonable people have caught the president telling an explicitly incontestable untruth” (itself an appraisal reasonable people might contest). But Erickson was even more severe regarding “those who so often have said so many preposterous things about [Obama],” since the president’s conservative detractors are, in a world that includes al-Qaeda and Kim Jong Un, “the worst enemies anyone can have.”
The Century Foundation’s Michael Cohen cast his net even wider, arguing that it would have been better if Obama had told the truth, but that the president really had no choice because Americans “can’t handle the truth.” Admitting that there would be some losers under Obamacare, as well as inevitable disruptions from an undertaking so ambitious, would have “made the path to reform that much politically harder to traverse,” rendering such candor impossible. “Voters want progress without sacrifice or inconvenience. Seemingly the only path to change is telling voters what they want to hear.”
Such resigned cynicism is, of course, exactly what Barack Obama was supposed to deliver us from. “Hope and Change” meant hoping for that change. At the Iowa Democratic party’s Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner in November 2007, Obama gave a speech so well received it propelled him to victory in the Iowa caucuses, then to winning the presidential nomination and election. The candidate declared, “Telling the American people what we think they want to hear, instead of telling the American people what they need to hear, just won’t do.” Democrats, he said, have “always made the biggest difference in the lives of the American people . . . when we summoned the entire nation to a common purpose — a higher purpose.”
And that’s where things become complicated: Summoning the entire nation to a higher purpose often requires telling people what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear. What people wanted to hear was that the higher purpose of guaranteeing “quality, affordable health care for every American,” to use Obama’s words, could be had easily and painlessly. And it turned out that this historic goal was surprisingly attainable. “Most of this plan,” the president told Congress in a September 2009 address on health-care reform, “can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health-care system, a system that is currently full of waste and abuse.” Giving millions of uninsured Americans health insurance, and improving coverage for millions more who already had insurance, not only wouldn’t increase the federal deficit, but was “a step we must take if we hope to bring down our deficit in the years to come,” Obama had explained earlier that year.
(parts 2 and 3 to come...must read material; use link for entire piece now)
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372344/print
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