Obama Lied — White House Aides Debated President's Pledge to Americans: 'You Can Keep Your Plan'

The president lied to the American people. It wasn't a "talking point." It wasn't a "political lie" to get something passed. It wasn't "posturing." Obama made bald-faced lies, multiple times, telling citizens they could keep their healthcare plans if they liked them. And that they could keep their doctors. He lied. Again and again. "Period." You can keep your plan. "Period."

What part of "period" don't leftists understand? Leftists like this far-left Obama-shill Bill Scher at Bloggingheads, via Althouse, "'Bill Scher does not accept that it was a lie to say "if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it'."

The president's a disgusting pig and socialist scumbag liar. The Wall Street Journal documents it, mercilessly, "Aides Debated Obama Health-Care Coverage Promise: Behind the Scenes, White House Officials Worried About Insurance Pledge":

As President Barack Obama pushed for a new federal health law in 2009, he made a simple pledge: If you like your insurance plan, you can keep your plan. But behind the scenes, White House officials discussed whether that was a promise they could keep.

When the question arose, Mr. Obama’s advisers decided that the assertion was fair, interviews with more than a dozen people involved in crafting and explaining the president’s health-care plan show.

But at times, there was second-guessing. At one point, aides discussed whether Mr. Obama might use more in-depth discussions, such as media interviews, to explain the nuances of the succinct line in his stump speeches, a former aide said. Officials worried, though, that delving into details such as the small number of people who might lose insurance could be confusing and would clutter the president’s message.

“You try to talk about health care in broad, intelligible points that cut through, and you inevitably lose some accuracy when you do that,” the former official said.

The former official added that in the midst of a hard-fought political debate “if you like your plan, you can probably keep it” isn’t a salable point.

The breadth of Mr. Obama’s statement proved to be a miscalculation. Mr. Obama repeated the claim, with only occasional caveats, through this week, when a flurry of cancellation notices from insurers to customers around the country prompted him to recalibrate. The resulting furor has energized Republican opposition to the plan, which only a few weeks ago had fallen flat as a result of the party’s failed attempt to link it to government spending and debt deadlines.

“With 20/20 hindsight, maybe this should have been parsed more carefully,” said Jim Margolis, a media adviser to Mr. Obama’s campaigns in 2008 and 2012, said of Mr. Obama’s broad promise. But, he added, “The president’s statement seems fair.”

At the time the law was being written, Mr. Obama was trying to make the case for the health-care overhaul in understandable terms, and in an environment in which Republicans were casting it as a “big government” takeover of the health system. Mr. Obama’s aides were focused on telling people that disruption would be minimal and benefits from the law substantial.

Aides said that because insurers could continue offering plans, even those deemed to be substandard, if they were in existence at the time the law passed, Mr. Obama’s statement that “you can keep your plan” was solid.

“We thought we could fulfill the promise with this grandfathering clause,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania and a former White House health-care adviser.

The health law aims to eliminate certain low-premium policies that the administration said provide skimpy coverage and could leave people with high out-of-pocket costs. While it allows insurers to continue covering longtime customers with policies that were in existence as of March 2010, many insurers are canceling such plans because they would die out, anyway, in the absence of new customers.

About 5% of the U.S. population, or about 15.4 million people, are covered under individual health plans, and many of them—as many as 10 million—are expected to have their health plans terminated by their insurers by year-end, industry experts have said. These customers account for many of those now receiving cancellation notices; Mr. Obama says they will be able to buy better coverage on the new federal insurance exchange.

One former senior administration official said that as the law was being crafted by the White House and lawmakers, some White House policy advisers objected to the breadth of Mr. Obama’s “keep your plan” promise. They were overruled by political aides, the former official said. The White House said it was unaware of the objections.

Mr. Obama began offering broad assurances as he campaigned for president in 2008, before the Affordable Care Act was written or many of the details decided. In a presidential debate with Republican nominee John McCain, Mr. Obama said that “if you’ve got health care already…you can keep your plan.”

Before then, Hillary Clinton was making similar promises about her proposed health-care overhaul. As she campaigned for president in 2007, Mrs. Clinton said, “Here’s how my plan works: If you already have private insurance, and you’re happy with it, nothing changes. You keep that insurance.”

Mr. Obama adopted similar language during the campaign and continued to use it in the White House as he pitched Congress and the American people on his health-care legislation.

Jon Favreau, who served as Mr. Obama’s top speech writer, said that as they tried to promote the overhaul plan and explain it to the public, the aim was to make it as simple as possible “while still being true.”

“Simplification and ease of explanation were a premium, and that was true throughout the process,” he said.

Richard Kirsch, the former national campaign manager of Health Care for America Now, which pushed for the 2010 health law, said the words were reassuring—and true—for the vast majority of the people, and so his group never raised concerns about that claim. Adding an asterisk to note that people who had “shoddy insurance” might need to change plans was not practical, he said.

“The actual, accurate statement is if you have good insurance, and you like it, you can keep it,” said Mr. Kirsch, now a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal policy organization.

The fact that insurers are cancelling policies covering some people has become central to the Republican argument against the Affordable Care Act, adding to the administration’s problems as it struggles to fix a malfunctioning website.

Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, seized upon Mr. Obama’s words, writing in an email Friday to supporters, “Here’s the truth: Barack Obama knowingly and repeatedly lied to Americans.”

Like the idiot Bill Scher at Bloggingheads, leftists just keep piling on lie after lie to further deceive the public about their dishonest healthcare program. Here's top Obama-Democrat Robert Axelrod at the article:

David Axelrod, a senior White House adviser during the health-care fight, said there was no intention to mislead.

“The great misfortune here is that the website debacle occurred at the same time as this issue arising,” he said. “Because, if the website hadn’t gone down, then lots of these people would be going online and figuring out, ‘Hey I’m getting a better insurance policy, and I’ll have to pay less money for it.’ But they can’t, because the website is down.

“It’s a perfect storm that has created an opportunity for those who oppose the plan.”

That's bullshit. People are not finding cheaper policies on the website. They're finding inferior cookie-cutter policies with higher premiums and higher deductibles. This fact is why the new Democrat meme is that Americans were being sold "shoddy plans" on the individual market. But the policies weren't "shoddy." These were healthcare policies that millions of Americans researched, compared, evaluated and then purchased --- because they liked them.

These are plans like the one purchased by Kathleen Crowley, a woman booted from her health policy due to ObamaCare, covered in James Taranto's column yesterday, "President Obama's #ObamaCare Lie":

My health-care policy was cancelled, and the Obama administration's explanation that policies are being cancelled because they were "substandard" and issued by "bad apple" insurers is absolutely not true. I had a very comprehensive policy, with a large and solid national health insurer, and the reasons my policy was not "ACA compliant" is because I now have to pay for maternity coverage, general pediatric coverage and pediatric dental coverage, as prescribed by ObamaCare. I'm 55 years old, have no children and don't plan to have children. Clearly, I am beyond childbearing age, and without children. Why would I have to purchase pediatric dental insurance? Or general pediatric care?

ObamaCare is forcing people to purchase a product that they don't want and can't ever use. I do not need maternity or pediatric services but have to purchase them. The new policy that would have been "comparable" to my current policy is more expensive with higher deductibles.

The president's comment of "shop around" is so smug. I sat on hold with an insurer while "shopping around" yesterday for over 20 minutes and finally gave up because I had work to do. I'll now have to factor quite a bit of time into my day to "shop around" since this president's dictates have resulted in my loss of health insurance I liked very much, and the market is now flooded with other people "shopping around."

What the insurance debacle reveals is the ultimate failure of progressivism. Leftists pride themselves on superior knowledge and noble intentions. But when that knowledge and those intentions are tested in the real consumer marketplace they come up wanting, badly. It's one big fail after another, and don't forget that the country was warned about this from day one: "It won't work." We were warned, over and over, from congressional Republicans, from free-market think tanks, down to the thousands of tea party patriots protesting throughout 2009.

And things are not going to get better. The administration's not keeping its promises to have the website fully functioning by November 1st. Just this week Secretary Sebelius further soiled herself as a national laughingstock with her claims during congressional testimony that Healthcare.gov "didn't crash." Yet at the very second she uttered those words, House Republicans couldn't logon to the system and the error message was played on the overhead during the hearings, "the system is down at the moment."



It's all lies.

From Obama to Axelrod to Sebelius to this idiot Bloggingheads ghoul Bill Scher. It's all lies.

The country has been sold a bill of healthcare goods. And our healthcare system is being systematically dismantled and destroyed. This is no accident. It's like the generals in Vietnam who claimed that "we had to destroy the village in order to save it." Democrats had to destroy American healthcare in order to fundamentally transform it. And they knew that they were f-king the average Joe up the ass. So they lied. The president lied. Congressional Democrats lied. Stephanie Cutter lied. Leftist media shills lied. We've been lied to.

It's time to stop with the lies.

Tell Congress and the president to stop lying. Tell them that they're going pay for their lies. They will pay for it with their political hide, and if criminal negligence is found, they'll pay in a court of law and hopefully with time in a penitentiary. These are monumental lies that bring disgrace to representative government. There's going to be a reckoning. The 2014 elections are one year from now. Each national election is billed as the most important in American history. The 2012 presidential election filled the bill, and conservatives lost. They can't make that mistake again if they hope to salvage whatever decency and free will is left in this country. People need to rise up and say this is f-king enough.