The narrative from the administration on Obamacare changes so frequently that it becomes hard to separate out the lies from the half-truths. Take, for example, the fiction that the Affordable Care Act rescues Americans from the “substandard” health insurance policies the market has traditionally forced on them. The claim has been issued multiple times by White House spinmeister Jay Carney during his daily press briefings since the ill-fated rollout of Healthcare.gov, but was uttered not even once in the three and a half years leading up to it.
Or take instead President Obama’s claim that his health care law would lower annual insurance premiums by $2,500 per family. In case you’ve forgotten about that promise, the video below shows him making it 19 times.
OK, granted, he said “up to” or “as much as,” which is an old huckster trick, implying that a savings of $1 makes the boast in its most literal sense whole and truthful. But is that really what Americans have come to expect from their president? Talk about lowering your standards! Plus, even if we take the claim at face value, it is still a lie in the light of a document released on Thursday.
Following the president’s announced “keep your insurance” fix, the Centers For Medicare & Medicaid sent a 3-page memo to state insurance commissioners explaining his new edict.
The highlighted area on the first of the memo, reproduced below, reads:
Although affected individuals and small businesses may access quality health insurance coverage through the new Health Insurance Marketplaces in many cases with federal subsidies, some of them are finding that such coverage would be more expensive than their current coverage, and thus they may [be] dissuaded from immediately transitioning to such coverage.
But wait. How could coverage be more expensive if people’s insurance costs were going down by up to $2,500 per family? Maybe instead of the “Food Stamp president,” Obama should go down in history as the “fine print president.”
Howard Portnoy contributed to this report.
