The first post in this month's Obama Care unfolding disaster series can be accessed at:
Reason Magazine - The 12 biggest lies of Obama Care
Deception #1 President Obama: “If you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It Hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen in the future.”
Comments: He did not only make this claim and promise once, he repeated it dozens of times in many different ways but with the same unequivocal conviction: you can keep any plan that you have and like, Obama Care will not disrupt that reality.
But according to the Reason article, Politico reported back November, 2014 that more than 3.5 million Americans got slammed with cancellations of their current health insurance policies, directly as a result of Obama Care tenets. Since then, reliable sources have estimated that an additional 1.5 to 2.5 million Americans suffered the same fate, a fate that Obama promised would never happen.
Deception # 2 President Obama: "What we said was you can keep it [your current health insurance plan] if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.”
Comments: This was a weasely attempt to back track out of the first deception listed above. As millions of Americans began losing access to their preferred insurance plans, the administration tried to put the blame on the insurance companies that were doing nothing more than complying with Obama Care rules.
But the weasel words did not gain credibility since there never were these types of conditions place on the situation when the President promised if you like your plan, you can keep your plan. Again, it was unequivocal, not conditional as his deceptions tried to spin.
Deception #3 President Obama: “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period.”
Comments: another whopper of a lie. First of all, those 5-6 million American who lost their current insurance policy coverage lost access to their doctors since they were no longer insured.
Those Americans who actually bought an Obama Care insurance policy shortly found out that those policies had very narrow networks of doctors so that even if they did get insurance, they often could not get access to the doctors and specialist they had been seeing or wanted to see since their new Obama Care policies prohibited that access.
Deception #4 President Obama: “We’ll start by reducing premiums by as much as $2,500 per family."
Comments: Not even close. The majority of people that purchased Obama Care polices were confronted with both sky high premiums and sky high deductibles, realities that came nowhere close to getting each American family a $2,500 annual reduction in heir health insurance rates.
And that sticker shock was for 2014 policy costs. As we have reported many times in this blog, Obama Care policy holders are now facing double digit, and in some states, large double digit, increases in their policy costs in 2015 as insurance companies file their rate requests in each state. A $2,500 reduction is nowhere to be found in the Obama Care reality.
Deception #5 Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi: “It [Obama Care] will create 4 million jobs - 400,00 jobs almost immediately.”
Comments: I always chuckle when I hear Ms. Pelosi try to sound smart with numbers. Obama Care became and still is a major job and economic growth killer as companies have been shown to reduce their expansion and hiring plans in the face of additional business costs and taxes that will be caused by Obama Care.
Just this week we cited credible research that shows just in the medical device industry over 160,000 jobs have been lost as a result of Obama Care. There have been at least dozens and dozens of mergers in the health care field as hospitals merge with other hospitals, medical practices merge, etc.
There have been very few instance in human history where businesses merged and incremental new jobs were created. Businesses merge to find synergies and to reduce costs, costs that almost always include layoffs. As always, Pelosi never provided the assumption set and underlying calculations to show how she got to such ridiculous numbers, most likely because they did not exist, making her assertion an outright deception.
Deception # 6 President Obama: Obama Care “pushed back on the undue influence of special interests.”
Comments: According to the Reason article, this how the legislation “pushed back:”
- America’s health insurance companies, through their industry group, backed the President’s plans because it forced every American to purchase an insurance company from….America’s health insurance companies.
- The American Medical Association, and their member doctors, were promised that for their support, Obama Care supporters in Congress would fix/increase how much Medicare pays doctors for their services (another promise that apparently never came true).
- The Obama Care administration also cut deals with the drug industry by agreeing to not pursue several policies that were not in the best interests of the drug companies in exchange for their support of the legislation.
Deception # 7 President Obama: “We are on schedule, and will be ready for the marketplace to open on October 1.”
Comments: Needless to say, they were not ready on October 1. The supporting data systems processes, crashed, locked up, provided bad information, everything that could have gone wrong from a data processing perspective did go wrong. And this failure happened despite the wasteful and useless expenditure of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and three years worth of work.
But worse of all, high ranking members of the administration knew things were a disaster despite the public promises that everything was fine. According to new York Times reporting on October 12, 2013: “Confidential progress reports from the Health and Human Services department show that senior officials repeatedly expressed doubts that the computer systems for the federal exchange would be ready on time.”
That is why it is deception # 7.
Deception # 8 President Obama: “Regardless of how the Marketplace [i.e. the Obama Care online website where you could purchase insurance online] is managed, consumers will be able to access the Marketplace with ease.”
Comments: Just days before the system went live, both the Washington Post and Business Week reported that end-to-end testing of the computer systems had not been completed or verified operationally. Once the untested systems went live, potential customers were faced with access problems, turnaround problems, inaccurate information, hardly like another Obama quote where he promised that accessing Obama Care’s online website would be “the same way you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak - the same way you shop for a TV on Amazon.”
The reality of the roll out could not be further from this experience.
Deception #9 President Obama: "We expect to resolve these issues in the coming hours.”
Comments: Another deception or outright lie depending on your definition. Those hours turned into days which turned into weeks which turned into months, an ever lengthening time frame that frustrated millions of Americans trying to sign up for a policy “with ease.”
In the first month that the website was deemed “live,” it was actually accessible by Americans 42% of the time, an abysmal performance considering the cost of over $600 million. Imagine how ticked off you would-be if your email account, your Facebook page, your ability to use Google, etc. was accessible less than 50% of the time. Abysmal.
Deception #10 HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius: “Take away the volume, and it works.”
Comments: This was another attempt to correct previous deceptions. The claim was that there was nothing wrong with the website, there were just too many people trying to get onto the site at the same time.
First of all, this is an excuse for incompetence. The scenario of heavy volume should have been taken into consideration during the development of the website’s software. The administration had been hyping this process for years, did they think that all of the hype and all of the attention in the press was going to result in only a few hundred people trying to use the site? Pathetic planning skills if true.
Second, this was merely an excuse, not a reality. When outside experts were called in to review the situation, they quickly found that volume was not the issue, incompetent computer programming was the issue. It was not a volume issue, it was a basic program design issue, making this assertion by Sebelius deception #10.
Deception #11 Press Secretary Jay Carney: "No, we don’t have that data.”
Comments: It is unheard of to build any website and not know how many people are using it. But yet here was the Press Secretary saying, nope, we don’t have any data to share.
However, subsequent leaks from secret White House Obama Care meetings shows that the administration actually did have enrollment numbers that Carney claimed did not exist. The reasons for the lie is, in all likelihood, the numbers were pathetic.
Nationwide, only six people, in a nation of over 300 million people, signed up for Obama Care in the first day. By the end of the second day, only 248 people had signed up. Rather than admit this current failure, the administration decided just to lie that existing numbers of enrollment did not exist.
Deception #12 The head of the administration’s Obama Care exchange operation Gary Cohen: “The final Marketplace rule ensures Marketplace develop and follow high standards regarding the privacy and security of personal information while following Affordable Health Care Act requirements regarding the use of data.”
Comments: Sounds impressive, sounds like they were very concerned about protecting personal information from identity thieves. However, behind the scenes, at the same time that Cohen was giving the above deception to a Senate hearing, an internal HHS document stated the truth and not Cohen’s deception: “aspects of the system were not tested due to the ongoing development exposed a level of uncertainty that can be deemed as a high risk.”
The system had high risk elements, not "high standards regarding the privacy and security of personal information.” Subsequent experts who reviewed the security protocols called Obama Care’s data systems “an identity thief’s paradise.”
I understand why the administration would want to make the process look as positive as possible. However, when political spin turns into outright lies, then the credibility of this administration, this President, and Washington as a whole goes right down the tubes.
Combining these twelve lies with the many other lies of this administration, e.g. the NSA is not spying on ordinary Americans, Benghazi was caused by a video, Guantanamo’s prison would be shut down, etc., we end up with nation crisis in integrity and truth between the governing and the governed.
Trust is earned and Obama and his cohorts have a lot of earning to do if they ever expect us to believe anything they say in the future. The interesting question is whether they actually care if we believe them.
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