When Obama repeatedly made the claim – "If you like your health plan; you can keep your health plan" – objective observers knew it wasn't so. This morning, the media is buzzing with evidence that Obama knew it was a lie, but deliberately kept spinning the same phony claim for years.
The shock in all this is not that Obama was lying; he has a well established record of that. It's that somebody has uncovered the evidence; the smoking gun. The following is the NBC News account of the mess du jour for the White House and ObamaCare.
Our sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”
None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration….
Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”
That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.
Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”