It’s the old Big Fill in the Blank With Corporate Entity attack, with insurance companies now filling in the blank for Obama. He finds he must answer for the fact that he lied made “sweeping generalizations that can be contradicted by individual experiences” about keeping your plan if you like it so this is the obvious scapegoat. It is, after all, absolutely never the fault of Obama, Obamacare’s authors, Obamacare’s implementers when something goes wrong with Obamacare.

You can judge the extent to which the dam has broken on this particular promise in the media by how the Washington Post starts this write-up:

President Obama tried a new tack Wednesday as he fought back against criticism of his Obamacare claims.

In this construction, the president is at least no longer the unquestioned hero waging war against smear merchants, but kind of a hapless actor taking a new approach to his lie.

Fact-checkers and journalists have ruled that Obama wasn’t being truthful when he claimed that people who liked their insurance could keep it. Obama during a speech in Boston sought to cast the issue Wednesday as trying to weed out “bad apple insurers” who don’t provide enough coverage.

“One of the things health reform was designed to do was to help not only the uninsured but also the under-insured,” Obama said. “And there are a number of Americans, fewer than 5 percent of Americans, who’ve got cut-rate plans that don’t offer real financial protection in the event of a serious illness or an accident.

“Remember, before the Affordable Care Act, these bad apple insurers had free rein every single year to limit the care that you received or used minor pre-existing conditions to jack up your premiums or bill you into bankruptcy.”

For insurance companies, who were in bed with the administration on this law knowing they’d get tons of new customers legally required to buy their product, it must hurt to get kicked out of bed right after the deed is done.

Five percent of the American public is 17 million people. And, if that’s such a negligible number about whom one shouldn’t fret, why did we upend the entire health care system to help them against their will? This is really just an extension of the “we know what’s good for you” argument championed by Josh Barro this week. Sure, I said you wouldn’t lose your insurance if you liked it, but you were busy liking the wrong stuff, America!