Obama’s Lying Apology

by John Hinderaker in Obama Administration Scandals, Obamacare

Tonight’s headlines tell us that President Obama has apologized for the fact that Obamacare has caused millions of Americans to lose their health insurance. That is, of course, a striking headline, but if we read what Obama actually said, it is apparent that his objective was not to offer a sincere apology, but to continue the Obamacare cover-up. Here is the interview; I created a partial transcript which is commented on below:

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Obama said:

What happened? Well, first of all, I meant what I said, and we worked hard to try to make sure that we implemented it properly. But obviously we didn’t do a good enough job.

This is Obama’s fundamental lie. Unless Obama never read the Obamacare statute and was never briefed on it by his aides or by Congressional Democrats, he knew perfectly well that most Americans were going to lose their existing health insurance under Obamacare. Indeed, that was the point of the law: the administration could only finance subsidies for some Americans if it forced other Americans to buy, not the insurance they wanted, but insurance that would normally be considered absurdly overpriced. That is–to repeat–the principal point of the law.

We are talking about 5% of the population who are in what’s called the individual market. They’re out there buying health insurance on their own. And even though it only affects a small amount of the population, it means a lot to them, obviously to get this letter canceled.

This is BS, and Obama must know it. So far, many of the canceled policies that have hit the news have, in fact, related to the individual market. The fact that individual policies are being canceled left and right can’t possibly come as a surprise to Obama; in June 2010, his administration predicted (as we pointed out here) that once Obamacare was implemented, “more than” a range of 40 percent to 67 percent of all individual policies would be illegal, and therefore would be canceled.

But individual policies are only the tip of the iceberg. At the same time, the Obama administration predicted that up to 69% of all employer-sponsored plans would also be canceled in the first year of Obamacare (i.e., 2014). The tens of millions who will lose their employer-sponsored plans will dwarf the number who lose individual policies. Much as the Obama administration would rather talk about web site travails than canceled insurance, it prefers to talk about individual policies rather than the employer-sponsored policies where most Americans get their health insurance, and which are also doomed under Obamacare. But unless the Democrats intend to repeal or postpone the implementation of Obamacare indefinitely, they are only delaying the inevitable.

Chuck Todd: Do you think you owe these folks an apology for misleading them, even if you didn’t intentionally do it, but at this point they feel misled, and you have seen the anger that is out there.
Barack Obama: I regret very much that what we intended to do, which was to make sure that everybody is moving into better plans because they want them as opposed to because they are forced into it, but we weren’t as clear as we needed to be in terms of the changes that were taking place, and I want to do everything we can to make sure that people are finding themselves in a good position, in a better position than they were in before this law happened. And I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me and we’ve got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them and that we’re going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.

This is typical Obama incoherence. He is either a stupid person, or a clever politician impersonating a stupid person; take your pick. He says he didn’t intend to force people to change their health insurance arrangements, but his own administration adopted regulations that, by their own estimate, would force more than half of all Americans to do so, whether they wanted to or not. Is Obama entirely disconnected from, and not responsible for, his own administration?

He says that “we weren’t as clear as we needed to be in terms of the changes that were taking place.” Nonsense. Unclarity has nothing to do with it. Obama was perfectly clear: If you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it! The problem is not that he was unclear, the problem is that he lied. At the same time the Obama administration was making those promises, they were scheming to force you out of whatever insurance arrangements you now enjoy, like it or not.

Finally, Obama says that “we’re going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.” Really? Are they going to repeal Obamacare? Because short of that, the millions of Americans who are now losing the coverages they freely chose, and the many millions more who lose them over the next year or two, as planned by the Obama administration, are simply screwed.

 

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/11/obamas-lying-apology.php