Lying to Save Their Skins

By Matthew Vadum

Beset by criticism from all sides for its bungled healthcare exchange rollout, the Obama administration expects to weather the growing storm by lying, rationalizing, and running out the clock.

Mendacity, stalling, and stonewalling have worked well as part of a public relations strategy for the Obama administration over its first five years, so there is no point in changing a winning formula now. 

Besides, extravagant healthcare subsidies begin to kick in next year, and all that free money floating around is bound to calm irate consumers.

America’s first Marxist president has been able to get away with wrongdoing by lying to an incurious, docile media, which he knows has little interest in conducting good faith investigations of the Benghazi saga, Fast and Furious, multiple IRS abuses, and various other administration-wide scandals that have become too numerous to count. Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, is no different.

Even now, in the face of overwhelming evidence that the president has lied to the public with his oft-stated promise that “if you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period … If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan, period,” and slight variations thereof, the media refuses to call Obama’s deliberate misrepresentations lies.

Democrat hack Ezekiel Emanuel, who was part of the team that designed Obamacare, blames insurance companies.

People aren’t being dropped from their health plans because of Obamacare. Instead, he says it’s all the insurers’ fault.

“If an insurance company decides its changing how it’s going to structure its plan, that’s not the law doing it,” Emanuel said. “That’s the insurance company deciding for business reasons.”

Insurance companies hate the individual market so they’re trying to destroy it, he said.

“The insurance companies don’t like — the insurance companies don’t like the individual market as it’s constructed,” said Emanuel, sounding like a paranoid schizophrenic off his meds. “They see the future. That individual market is going away. They don’t want to invest in it.”

Taking his lead from admitted communist Van Jones, Benjamin Bell of ABC News wrote a news story in which he characterized Obama as “reversing course on his now famous promise that those Americans who like their plans could keep them if them if they wished under Obamacare.”

President Obama and Democratic politicians are already blaming insurance companies, instead of the true culprit, anti-market government policies, for the recent nationwide tsunami of Obamacare-related insurance policy cancellations.

Obama demonizes insurance companies that provide affordable health care insurance as “bad-apple insurers” that “had free rein every single year to limit the care that you received, or use minor preexisting conditions to jack up your premiums or bill you into bankruptcy.” He vilified insurers further by calling affordable plans that pre-date the misnamed, mandate-heavy Affordable Care Act “substandard plans” and “junk.”

Obama surrogates in the media also do his dirty work.

Left-wing commentator Rick Ungar lectured a woman on “Hannity,” chastising her for her choice of healthcare plans. On the TV show 29-year-old Natalie Willis told how she lost a health insurance plan in the individual marketplace that she liked, despite the president’s promise that she could keep it. She will have to pay more money for the same amount of coverage under a new plan.

The patronizing Ungar scolded the young woman as if he thought she was too dumb to know what was in her plan.

“I would like to sit down with Natalie and get on the exchange,” Ungar said. “You know what else Natalie didn’t mention? You can buy a policy off the exchange, have you checked that out?”

“You don’t know,” Ungar continued. “Let me make the point. If you go to buy a car and you don’t pick up the hood, right? You buy the car and then you get in the car and it doesn’t start. You know why? There was no engine under the hood and you didn’t know it.”

As Katie Pavlich observes

“Ungar argues Willis simply didn’t know what was in her plan and implied she hadn’t done the proper research to realize she had subpar insurance in the first place. Further, he argued healthcare plans on the Obamacare exchanges would provide better coverage at a better price, which isn’t true.”

Telling disgruntled consumers that it’s their own fault they’re losing health insurance isn’t what most people would consider a winning strategy, but it’s one of the few options Democrats have left.

On this past Sunday’s edition of “This Week,” former green jobs czar and 9/11 truther Van Jones mock-scolded the president, saying he would “pay a price,” for reversing course on his promise that Americans would be able to keep their healthcare plans despite all the mandates and restrictions of Obamacare.

“And he overpromised. And he will, listen, he will pay a price. ‘Mission accomplished,’ you pay a price. ‘No new taxes,’ you pay a price. ‘You keep your plan,’ you pay a price,” Jones said.

Except that Obama didn’t merely overpromise on Obamacare. He attached no caveats whatsoever to his promise that satisfied consumers would be able to keep their health insurance plans. It was this sweeping promise made over and over again at campaign rallies across America that helped to sell Obamacare to the public and win Obama reelection last year.

On TV, Jones lapsed into incoherence, babbling that the Obama administration tried to achieve too much with the launch of the barely functional HealthCare.gov website.

“First of all, they tried to do too much on this website, you could just have the website where you allow people to shop and then they could just call in, I mean, they tried to do too much and I think part of it was because it was a central thing they did, they tried to do too much,” he said. In the age of Netflix and Amazon, taking an order for a service doesn’t sound like too tall an order.

The Marie-Antoinettes on the editorial board of the money-losing New York Times now say at worst Obama is guilty of slips of the tongue.

“Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that” consumers would be able to keep their plans, said the pontificators at the soon-to-be-defunct agenda-setting media outlet.

And congressional Republicans are the real bad guys, according to the paper, because they have needlessly “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.”

Now that that’s all cleared up, recall that Forbes magazine revealed last week that the Obama administration has known for three years that as many as 93 million Americans will be forced out of their employer-sponsored health insurance plans when the employer mandate is enforced in 2015.

In other words, President Obama has been lying to Americans for at least three years, reassuring them that they would be able to keep their current healthcare plans, but knowing they wouldn’t.

But now a new analysis says the 93 million estimate is too low, and that at least 129 million Americans will lose coverage if Obamacare is fully implemented.

More than two thirds of Americans with private health insurance can expect to be booted from their plans, says economist Christopher Conover, a research scholar at the Center for Health Policy & Inequalities Research at Duke University and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

“Bottom line: of the 189 million Americans with private health insurance coverage, I estimate that if Obamacare is fully implemented, at least 129 million (68 percent) will not be able to keep their previous health care plan either because they already have lost or will lose that coverage by the end of 2014,” he told the Daily Caller.

Obama must have known this while he flogged his health care bill by promising Americans they could keep their health insurance if they liked it.

“If President Obama himself believed this the first time he said it, he was poorly advised,” Conover said.

“The problem is that he said it at least 24 times, most of which occurred after his own rule-writers had estimated that 49-80 percent of small employer plans would have lost their grandfather status by 2013, along with 34-64 percent of large employer plans. The same rule estimated that each year 40 to 67 percent of non-group plans not already grandfathered would lose their grandfather status. Given how extensively presidential statements — especially to a joint session of Congress — are vetted and fact-checked, it is pretty inconceivable that President Obama was not aware that he was engaged in some degree of truth-twisting.”

Lying has served Barack Hussein Obama well in his career.

Why stop now?