Obama lied for you, not to you
[UPDATE: I’m adding this link as an update rather than an addendum, in order to spotlight it.]
Obama lied, millions lost their health care.
A defense is shaping up, though, from Democrats like New Jersey’s Joe Vitale:
Critics, however, say the changes belie the president’s often-repeated claim that if you like your insurance plan, you can keep it.
But state Sen. Joe Vitale (D-Middlesex) said it’s a nuanced promise.
“The president also said he won’t tolerate benefit plans that don’t meet the basic needs of our citizens,” Vitale said.
“Basic needs”—like maternity and newborn benefits for those in their 60s. That sort of thing.
Vitale’s statement expresses a basic liberal tenet, though, which is that liberals (and particularly, liberals in the government) know better than you what you need, and they are determined to “help” you get it. Obama, the good father, is looking out for you, and “won’t tolerate” plans that he, in his infinite wisdom, has decided are not what you need. No matter what you may want.
So if he lied to you about it, it was really For Your Own Good.
[ADDENDUM: Here’s another justification, this time from Josh Barro at Business Insider. His article ends with the words:
“If you like your health plan, you can keep it” was never a reasonable promise; health reform that addressed America’s combination of high cost, middling outcomes and spotty coverage was necessarily going to have to change a lot of people’s health plans. So yes, that statement is proving false ”” and it’s a good thing.]
The “noble lie”.
But it’s still a lie.
Sen. Joe Vitale (Middlesex, NJ, D) – yep, this is the kind of thing our Garden State politicians say – and the idiot voters around here just eat this up like a wolf chowing down on caribou hindquarters.
I so need to get out of this blue state. But, is there any place to go?
As the saying goes:
“Liberalism–ideas so good they have to be mandatory.”
It isn’t quite what you’re implying here, Neo. The law only applies the new requirements to newly issued plans — it specifically grandfathers in existing plans. Of course, insurance companies are free to cancel plans, but they were always free to cancel plans before. So the “guaranteed” isn’t correct — it’s only “guaranteed” if your insurer doesn’t cancel your existing plan after it expires — but that was always the case.
There is an argument to be made that Obamacare has incentivized insurers to cancel legacy plans just to streamline their operations — it’s more difficult to administer multiple plans, some of which are grandfathered in and some which aren’t, so your critique isn’t totally off, but in fairness you ought to mention this aspect of the law which was designed to allow plans to continue to exist that existed prior to the new regulations.
“. . . a nuanced promise.”
A nuanced promise is a lie as katzxy noted above.
I read over the weekend in a comment (was it here?) a liberal is someone who believes that people are too stupid to run their own lives but smart enough to run yours. I give you Joe Vitale, whose resignation from office would, alone, noticeably raise the average IQ of New Jersey’s state senate.
http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/10/andrew-breitbart-take-on-the-bullies-on-the-playground/
Remember to poke the Left’s evil in the eye every once in awhile.
Don’t forget that if the Tea Party fails and all this “voter election” shenanigans go up in a fire, there will be one thing that has always destroyed evil: death and war.
From Kaiser on grandfathered plans:
I’d expect quite a few employers are increasing the cost of employees’ premiums, copays, and deductibles, so there’s goes the grandfathered guarantee.
All the leftist want is that tiny little sliver of land known as the Sudetenland and one or two more of your niggling little personal freedoms and they’ll be totally content. Really, they will.
And apparently the Neville Chamberlain branch of the GOP is ready to cooperate so long as it insures “peace in our time”.
Mitsu has guaranteed to us we won’t end up with the Far Left nationalized healthcare of Europe.
Mitsu, as you must know, your claims about grandfathering are inaccurate. (Or nuanced, maybe?) The grandfathering exception does NOT apply to all existing plans, the new requirements are not limited to “newly issued” plans, as you claim, nor is there any requirement for a plan to be “canceled,” as you said, before it loses grandfathered status. Instead, all that has to happen for a plan that existed on March 23, 2010 to lose its grandfathered status is for the insurer to make significant changes in benefits or in the amount of deductibles, premiums, copays and such. What’s a significant change, you ask? The answer is spelled out in pages and pages and pages of federal regulations that I am not about to read, and I’ll bet you won’t, either, but as a shortcut, the number of plans that have managed to stay close enough to what they were in 2010 to retain grandfathered status is dwindling fast. According to Kaiser, 56 percent of people with employment-based coverage were in grandfathered plans in 2011, down to 48 percent in 2012 and 36 percent right now. In a few years, none will be left.
(Kaiser’s FAQ on this subject — the most reliable summary I could find on short notice — is here: http://tinyurl.com/kz4q4uu If you prefer and have the stomach for it, you can read the grandfathering regulations themselves, here: http://tinyurl.com/aaxl974 )
Now mind you, anybody who BELIEVED Obama back when he was lying about this — excuse me, making “nuanced promises” — during the runup to passage of the ACA was choosing to be a gullible fool. It was quite obvious back then that Obama’s statements on this subject could not be true, given everything else we were being told about the ACA, and a number of us said so. Maybe you weren’t one of them; maybe you believed the promises, and perhaps that’s why you’re stretching for ways to defend them now. Fine, but please try to do so accurately. On this subject, I for one have had enough of factual distortions, “nuances” and lies.
Commenter “Ann” and I were apparently posting at the same time. I didn’t see her comment until mine went up — funny that we both found the same Kaiser site!
I’m beginning to think that a lot of this is due to the fact that Obama wasn’t really interested in Health Insurance at all. The whole Obamacare law was a mashup of all kinds of progressive gobbledygook trying to reconcile with the fact that most people were pretty happy with their Health insurance. For nearly 3 years the President paid no attention to his only signature effort (because it was Nancy Pelosi’s).
So he could say things like “you can keep your plan” in all sincerity since he didn’t really know what the law was. This is truly worse than lying
You’ll know what’s in it when we pass the bill. Obama believed it, perhaps.
Okay, Mrs Whatsit, but the point is the grandfathering idea was supposed to protect existing plans. If it was poorly written, then that’s a legitimate complaint. But without looking at the details of why people in grandfathered plans are leaving, it’s hard to say. Perhaps it is simply because employers switched to a newer plan because they preferred it.
When I chose health plans for my last startup we changed plans pretty much every year, to get a better deal for our money. I suspect many companies are doing that as well.
“Tiberius as often as he left the Senate-House used to exclaim in Greek, “How ready these men are to be slaves.” Clearly, even he, with his dislike of public freedom, was disgusted at the abject abasement of his creatures …” Tacitus
It was obvious from the start the democrats were lying. They claimed they would provide medical care for 30 million more people and it would cost less. They either can’t do math, AKA morons, or they are pathological liars.
No Mitsu, you’ve still got it wrong. I didn’t say anything about people leaving grandfathered plans. I have no idea whether that’s happening and it is not relevant in any way to what we were discussing. I was talking about plans losing grandfathered status. This doesn’t happen because people leave the plans. It’s the other way around. Plans lose grandfathered status because they change enough that the government takes their grandfathered status away. Then the no-longer-grandfathered plan must meet ACA requirements, and the people who are in that plan have lost the coverage they had before, whether they liked it or not, whether they stay in the plan or not, and whether they believed Obama’s blather or not. They have lost it because the government has, in effect, taken it away.
As for poor writing, if you glanced at the Kaiser site or the regulations I linked for you at all, you know that poor writing has nothing to do with it. The regulations don’t take grandfathered status away by accident in spite of some benign intent to keep it. They do it intentionally, in dozens of different ways, in mind-numbing detail, with the clear goal of reducing the number of grandfathered plans as quickly and thoroughly as possible. You know this, just as you knew — since you can clearly read — when you wrote your 5:11 comment that I was not talking about people who leave grandfathered plans. Again, I ask you please to try to stick with facts and leave the distortions elsewhere.
Mitsu, it really doesn’t matter why plans are being cancelled, although the excuses being given by the insurance companies themselves blame Obamacare. But no matter, 300k people in Florida lost their coverage. 100k people in California lost their coverage. And now the only potential option they have is to buy a policy off of the exchanges. 9 out of 10 people will therefore see an increase in their preimum. The Saiint just checked his “available” plans, and the cheapest policy on the plan is 2xs the cost of his current plan.
Also, be aware that anyone who was able to keep his/her plan will pay more taxes because of the “Transitional Reinsurance Program Contribution Fee” and the “Health Insurer Fee. Only a couple of the hidden taxes in the bill that nobody read before it was passed.
One of the insurance company executives recently said that people aren’t losing their coverage, they are just being “transitioned”. https://grabien.com/file.php?id=10009 Don’t you just love the double speak.
Let’s see how this excuse could be used other places:
“Mr. Smith, we had to transition your family dog. Where would you like to bury him.”
“Well Bob, we have decided to transition you to the unemployment line.”
“Really, Mary, it isn’t you, I am just transitioning to another girlfriend.”
“Honest officer, I was just transitioning some of the Bank’s money into this little bag here, with the help of the note that said I had a gun.”
“I did not have sex with that woman, I was just transitioning……….”
You get the point.
>I didn’t say anything about people leaving grandfathered plans
I’m referring to the Kaiser statistics you cited. Those statistics just talk about how many people are covered by grandfathered plans. Those stats don’t explain WHY the percentage of people covered by grandfathered plans is declining. It could be because those plans are being cancelled because of the regulations you cite, or it could be because employers are changing plans.
If a lot of grandfathered plans are being cancelled *because of* Obamacare directly, then that’s a legitimate complaint, as I already said. I’m just saying your statistics cite doesn’t itself restrict itself to only those plans that are cancelled because of the grandfathering regs.
Mitsu is referring to how he doesn’t know Obama’s the reason why those plans are being wiped out.
Today’s assignment is to read the “Kinght’s Defense” at the end of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral
They didn’t kill Beckett. It was a suicide because he should have known they were out to get rid of him and he wouldn’t run! He left them no choice and actually hurt them by making them do such a horrible thing! And that is probably why they had to kill him. He was just that sort of wicked person! Thank you very much.
Or one could read about Plato and how his dream about the Republic is so wonderful that everyone else must submit to the Philosopher Kings. If you don’t do that you are stupid and wicked. And anyway, you ARE ipso facto stupid. That’s why you’re not one of the Philosopher Kings!
Liberalism never ever ever ever ever issues in anything but totalitarianism. That is its essence.
Liberals have a notoriously monolithic mindset, which should not come as a surprise, when you consider that left-wing ideology favors consolidation or monopoly formation.
No, of course you’re right — the fact that everything else on that Kaiser site is explicitly addressed to the impact of grandfathering regs on insurance policies clearly doesn’t indicate that Kaiser was talking about plans that lose grandfathered status, rather than people who choose to leave grandfathered plans, when it phrased its statistics in terms of the dwindling number of people who are in grandfathered plans. Goodness no. Why of course not. Honestly, Mitsu, you are disingenuous enough to compete with Obama himself.
I don’t have time to track down statistics for you that address this in terms of numbers of plans rather than numbers of covered people but here’s one article from earlier this year that talks about the effect of the ACA on insurance plans, rather than on individual insured people, in terms that will make it hard even for you to deny that the problem has nothing to do with individual choice:
http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/03/news/economy/health-insurance-exchanges/
And YOU didn’t say anything about your former “poor writing” claim. Did you look at the regs or the details about them on the Kaiser site? Do you really still claim that this was some kind of well-intentioned misguided bumbling effort to allow most Americans who liked their former coverage to keep it, as the President promised, or are you ready to acknowledge that the whole “grandfathering” concept was never anything but a smoke screen?
As for plans being canceled because of Obamacare directly, that’s an entirely different subject unrelated to grandfathering of continued plans. Plenty has been said on that subject, but here’s one that — like many plans previously offered by professional associations, writers’ and artists’ guilds and other such groups is being canceled because Obamacare effectively forbids it: http://www.avmaghlit.org/content/healthcare-reform.aspx
Mrs Whatsit,
Mitsu is an Obama supporting Leftist here to show his bonafides of being a fence sitter looking over his nose at both sides.
Also Sarah Palin hater.
So take what he writes with a drop of the ocean.
Please read this post by Ace on the issue of grandfathered plans.
“. . . the democrats . . .
eithercan’t do math, AKA morons,or[and] they are pathological liars.” (Ray @ 5:23)Fixed it for you; these are not mutually exclusive.
Mrs Whatsit:
Perhaps “Mitsu” is Obama’s nom de blog.
He will exhaust you if you’re not careful.
Really? If they wanted to protect existing plans, they could have grandfathered all of them, and allowed them to change. The intent of the grandfathering would appear to be to make it so the ACA did not change all plans at once. To create a more gentile transistion, as it were.
Maybe the President could have a press conference and answers some questions. This is, as we know, the most transparent administration in history.
Strange to think how those healthy persons with individual policies having high deductibles, are now punished with higher insurance payments for enjoying and maintaining that same good health – with no escape for them from being harnessed to the dysfunctional, other than emigration or violence.
A claim under law is now laid against your very life; and you are invited to pay up for others, or pay the recusancy fine.
The remarkable thing about this no exit implementation of the left’s social insurance ideal, is that for the first time it makes perfectly obvious the calculus that healthy people really would be objectively better off, continuing to enjoy both a greater personal freedom as well as those benefits of their own life energies they once knew, with the intended beneficiaries of Obamacare, dead.
The dysfunctional are now chained around one’s neck by the force of Federal law.
Remarkable place, to which these “social insurance” and commitment to a shared fate types, have finally brought us.
Orwell was only off by 30 years. Not bad considering the year in which he wrote the novel.
Ymarsakar and neo, of course you’re right. I remember Mitsu’s tactics well from prior tangles with him back when he haunted this blog before the ACA passed with similar feats of hairsplitting, distraction and denial. I hate to let falsehoods and factual distortions stand unchallenged — but yes, the time does come to acknowledge that Mitsu’s fooling nobody except, possibly, himself, and step aside.
“It wasn’t my lie — it was the whole (leftist) world’s lie!”
To fight the Left merely requires destroying their moral and intellectual sense of superiority. It does not require a debate.
A sword, a gun, and a bomb does the job just as well.
Charles Says:
If you don’t mind perpetual summer and the occasional hurricane, c’mon down to Louisiana .
Avoid New Orleans or the urban centers though. They are mostly Democrat fiefdoms. Hear now a days the police departments for cities are no longer reporting violent crime, in order to fake up some stats for union-political campaigns.
This reminds me of the CS Lewis quote: “Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good
of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live
under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may
at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good
will torment us without end for they do so with the approval
of their own conscience.”