Yesterday NBC published an article outlining why the Obama Administration cannot feign ignorance as millions of Americans have their health insurance policies cancelled due to Obamacare.
What NBC stated is what hundreds of thousands of people already know – Obamacare is forcing millions of Americans to lose their insurance, pay much higher premiums, get higher deductibles, and in general get less coverage for more money.
The White House and Valerie Jarrett went into immediate attack mode to proclaim the premise as false. They each claimed nothing President Obama or the HHS did created a situation where private insurance polices were/are cancelled.
So NBC, carrying water for the administration, took down their article and replaced it with another one with a paragraph removed. But various blogs, including us, caught them. Backlash ensued. They were busted – so they replaced the replacement and reinstated the original.
But the key aspect is inside the paragraph they removed and the *risk* to the White House which is evident within it. Here’s what they took out, then put back in when caught:
…”None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date — the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example — the policy would not be grandfathered”….
You can immediately see the sunlight risk. The Obama Administration, through the HHS, were actually the people who structured the regulations which has led to cancellations of millions of policies. Weaselzippers accurately puts it this way:
[Obamacare] the law doesn’t actually dictate the cancellation of the policies, the cancellations are dictated by the HHS regulations, narrowing the law.
Regulations are completely and utterly within the power and control of HHS, Obama and the executive branch. What that means is they could change it if they wanted to, and that it was completely their choice to do this, despite Obama lying about it.
They dictated these cancellations because they want to drive people into the exchanges, because it is the only possible way to monetarily sustain the system, or it would collapse under its own weight.
So while Obama is lying to people, he is completely dictating the cancellations through his administration.
This is the twisted nature of the President we have.
You can see how dangerous this is politically. It was not the law which forced the cancellation of millions of insurance policies, it was HHS regulations which did so.
And THAT paints President Obama into a box.
Yes, he can claim the “law” did not cause the cancellations, therefore his “if you like your insurance you can keep it” might be parsed as truthful under the construct of Obamacare.
However, it was President Obama specifically, through the HHS, who then structured the regulations which made his prior point of ‘keep it’ advocacy moot.
It was not Obamacare which took down the individual person’s ability to retain their own insurance policy pre-Obamacare, it was President Obama himself who did it.
So when you see White House folks like Jay Carney talking you can see what they are trying to skirt around. Subsequently the Democrats who go forth with the talking points are going to have to find similar linguistic judo to avoid the fact that President Obama is the one specifically to blame.
This should be interesting.
WASHINGTON DC – White House press secretary Jay Carney on Tuesday said President Obama’s claim that all Americans could keep their health insurance plans under the new health law deserved a “fuller explanation,” acknowledging millions of consumers would not keep their current coverage.
After the passage of Obamacare, the president has repeatedly insisted that if any individual likes their health care plan, they could “keep it.”
Carney on Tuesday added a crucial caveat to that promise, saying Americans could keep their insurance if the plan is “still available.”
In other words, if the plan is modified, coverage options that don’t meet Obamacare standards could be canceled. (link)
Spin – Baby – Spin !!!
WASHINGTON DC - White House press secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday that President Obama did not mislead the American people when he said the anybody who liked his or her health insurance plan could keep it after the health-care law’s implementation.
“No,” Carney said at Tuesday’s White house briefing when asked directly whether Obama misled. “The president was clear about a basic fact: If you had insurance that you liked on the individual market and you wanted to keep that insurance through 2010, ’11, ’12, ’13, and in perpetuity if you wanted it and it was available, you could. You were grandfathered in.”
Carney said the statement was true but that it couldn’t account for insurers canceling or changing existing plans after the law was passed. Existing plans that don’t meet a set of standards set out by the health-care law have been canceled.
“What no health care reform could envision or could responsibly stipulate is that any plan that might come along in the next few years would be grandfathered in because that would undermine the basic premise of providing minimum benefits for the American people,” Carney said.
“So again, in all of these cases, what is absolutely true is that if you had a plan before the Affordable Care Act that you liked on the individual market, and your insurance company didn’t take that away from you and offer you instead something else that you then purchased, but they provided you the same plan this whole time, you can keep it. And that’s true.”
Reporters relentlessly questioned Carney on the years-old and oft-repeated claim by Obama and the administration, in light of recent disclosures that many or most people who have purchased insurance as individuals could see those plans canceled. (link)