Obama: What we said was, you can keep your plan if it hasn't changed since ObamaCare was passed

Via RCP. I posted the key quote last night in the Greenroom but figured you’d want to hear him say it, as proof that he really is willing to lie this shamelessly even when the entire country knows he’s lying. Reporters are laughing at him today:

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Ron Fournier went to the bother of fact-checking “the lie about the lie” while Tapper reminded his Twitter followers that the White House once sneered that alleged “facts” like keeping your plan if you like it are stubborn things. Via NRO, watch below as former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham wonders just how stupid Obama thinks we are. Both Gallup and Reuters have his job approval at 40 percent; I wonder if this won’t finally nudge him into the 30s.

Rich Lowry imagines what an honest speech about ObamaCare might have looked like circa 2009:

But let me be clear again — and Axelrod hates this part [Laughter] — many of you are going to pay more than you did before. Maybe double. Because all of these new regulations cost money. You don’t believe in a free lunch, do you? [Confused murmurs.]

What we’re proposing is to get young, healthy people onto the exchanges so they can subsidize everyone else, by buying coverage they don’t want or need at a price that is higher than before. Why would they do that, you ask? [Faint laughter.] That’s what the individual mandate is all about. We’ve got to force them.

As for the doctor you like, you might not be able to keep him or her, either. [Murmurs.] If you have to change your plan, your doctor may not be in the network. And to try to keep costs down, the networks in the exchanges are really narrow. By the way, top hospitals probably aren’t going to accept a lot of plans from the exchanges, either.

Some of my friends on my side of the aisle try to minimize all this. They say that the bill has a grandfather clause. Wait until you see the regulations we write on that one — there will barely be a grandfather clause left.

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In an alternate universe, he gave that speech and ObamaCare got 40 votes in the Senate. In this universe, per Jamie Dupree, the White House website still features stuff like this. No joke:

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Here’s the clip. The Big Lie about the Big Lie comes at the beginning, but watch to the end to see how Obama spins the fact that many plans aren’t qualifying for grandfather status. He’s basically equating “better” coverage with more comprehensive coverage irrespective of cost. That’s slightly different from the standard Democratic lie that any plan that fails to qualify under the new regs must be cut-rate crap that’s unfit for American consumers. (See Karl’s post this morning for more on that.) Hard to sell the public on that idea when so many people are telling reporters how much they miss their old plan. So now, rather than disparaging the non-grandfathered stuff, O’s simply saying that the new stuff is superior because it covers more than the old plans did. The fact that the new stuff is also wildly more expensive in some cases seems not to matter to him when calculating whether one plan is “better” than another. You might end up in the poorhouse, but you’ll have gold-plated substance-abuse coverage when you eventually take up drinking to cope. You’re welcome, America.

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David Strom 11:20 AM | April 24, 2024
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