Obama Lied, Healthcare Coverage Died

My article from today's FrontPage Magazine:

Obama Lied, Healthcare Coverage Died

By Matthew Vadum

Although federal officials have known for at least three years that Obamacare would cause millions of Americans to lose health insurance coverage, that didn’t stop President Obama from lying repeatedly, reassuring voters the law would not adversely impact their existing coverage.

In an uncharacteristically media-savvy move aimed at capitalizing on current affairs, 

Republicans compiled a list of 13 Democrats –including Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.)– who deceived voters by obediently repeating Obama’s lies.

Providing another ground for impeachment to pile on to the growing list of Obama’s high crimes and misdemeanors, NBC News reported that four sources “deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act” said 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.”

Many of those required to buy more expensive new policies will experience “sticker shock,” the sources said.

The administration generated an estimate in July 2010 that stated “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,” according to NBC.

But President Obama, who said the year before, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still promising in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”

For years President Obama has told the public over and over again that after Obamacare took effect, those who were satisfied with their current health coverage would be able to keep it. Obama’s constant reassurances anesthetized skeptical voters, downplaying the government takeover of the healthcare system. The president told Americans their health care premiums would fall $2,500 per year and they would retain their choice of medical providers. Many Americans, especially on the Left, projected their own fantasies onto Obamacare, and are only now beginning to realize that Obamacare isn’t actually a cost-free program that causes free health care to fall from the sky.

The 2010 estimate demonstrates that “when they made the promise, they knew half the people in this market outright couldn’t keep what they had and then they wrote the rules so that others couldn’t make it either,” said consultant Robert Laszewski of Health Policy and Strategy Associates. He says 80 percent of those in the individual market will be forced out of current policies and be compelled to purchase insurance that complies with the Obamacare statute, which mandates expensive benefits.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the company of First Lady Michelle Obama’s college friend received a no-bid contract to construct the malfunctioning Obamacare website. As the Daily Caller reports,

“Toni Townes-Whitley, who worked alongside her classmate Michelle Obama in multiple Princeton University student groups, became senior vice president of CGI Federal in May 2010. CGI was the only eligible company considered for the contract to build the disastrous HealthCare.Gov Obamacare enrollment site … Townes-Whitley maintained her relationship with the first couple after joining CGI, even enjoying ‘Christmas with the Obamas’ at the White House in 2010.”

CGI Federal Inc., the primary contractor on the joke of a website, also screwed up a Canadian-taxpayer funded project, a federal gun registry. The Canadian government canceled the company’s contract in 2007 after that country’s Auditor General determined that the Canadian Firearms Information System (CFIS) being built by CGI was “significantly over budget” and was repeatedly delayed.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration won’t say how many people have actually enrolled in the exchanges.

The administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Marilyn Tavenner, repeatedly refused to give a straight answer to a congressional committee about how many Americans have signed up with the exchanges.

“We’ll have that information available for you in mid-November,” Tavenner said under questioning from House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.). Tavenner confirmed that CMS is aiming for 7 million enrollees by March 31 next year.

The bungled roll-out lends some credibility to the theory that Obamacare was designed to fail in order to clear the way for what the Left really wants: a one-size-fits-all single payer scheme that feeds the insatiable leftist fetish of equality — equally bad healthcare for all.

CMS’s Tavenner and Democratic lawmakers are already blaming insurance companies, instead of the true culprit, government policy, for the recent nationwide tsunami of Obamacare-related insurance policy cancellations.

Left-wingers are becoming downright kooky in their desperate efforts to explain away the Obama administration’s roll-out failures.

Washington Post conspiracy theorist Ezra Klein, the creator of the “Journolist” propaganda machine, blames Republicans for participating in a make-believe campaign to do “everything possible to sabotage” Obamacare. The GOP’s “plan to undermine the law worked too well,” Klein pontificates.

Congressman Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) flew out of his chair yesterday during a congressional hearing about the Affordable Care Act’s bungled launch. Pascrell accused Republicans of making up problems with Obamacare in order to justify repealing it.

Sixties civil rights protester John Lewis, now an undistinguished garden-variety socialist Democrat serving in the House of Representatives, played the racism card. Comfortably ensconced in a safe Atlanta, Ga., congressional district that would elect and reelect until the end of time anyone with a “D” after his or her name, Lewis said yesterday that Republican attempts to repeal Obamacare remind him

“of another period in our history. Not so long ago during the 50s, many Southern senators signed a Southern Manifesto after the [Brown v. Board of Education] Supreme Court decision of 1954. And those senators — along with many Southern governors — subscribed to the doctrine of interposition and notification and some even massive resistance.”
 “That’s what we saw on the part of the Republican members of the House and some of the Republicans in the Senate,” he said of GOP attempts to strip away funding for Obamacare. Lewis conveniently ignored the fact that the 1956 manifesto of which he spoke, a document that opposed the racial integration that the high court cleared the way for, was signed by 99 politicians, 97 of whom were Democrats.

Of course, Lewis likes to lie in order to advance causes he supports. In March 2010 Lewis and Congressman Andre Carson (D-Ind.) falsely claimed Tea Party supporters hurled the N-word at them as they walked past an anti-Obamacare rally outside the U.S. Capitol in March 2010. (Carson, a black Muslim who wants U.S. schools turned into Islamic madrassas, also told a black audience that Tea Party supporters wanted to see “you and me hanging on a tree.”)

The intellectually mediocre Clarence Page embraces Obama’s self-serving explanation that the problems surfacing with Obamacare are the products of mere technological glitches rather than terrifying foreshadowings of the amply documented lethality of government-run healthcare.

The economically illiterate columnist shrugs that Obamacare may not be to blame for recent increases in insurance premiums, deductibles, and co-payments. “[A]fter decades of rising rates and reduced benefits, as well as rising health care costs, it’s hard to tell how much of the increase would have happened anyway.”

Even though the exchanges are artificial government-created cartels that have nothing to do with free markets, Page deludes himself into believing that Obamacare “opens up competition that … will reduce the increases in cost.” As the Jan. 1 deadline approaches for Obamacare coverage to take effect, “the law, like the federal website, needs more work,” he writes. No matter how awful the rollout may be, Obamacare is still “worth the effort,” according to the Obama lapdog.

No failure, no mountains of evidence, no body count, will ever be enough to convince left-wing true believers like Clarence Page that socialist healthcare is a bad idea.

The Left will continue rationalizing away the failures of Obama and Obamacare no matter how damning the evidence that emerges.

And Barack Obama will continue to be a saintly figure in their eyes as he gets away with  murder.