I could come up with hundreds of links like this one, the Washington Post’s 4 Pinocchio rating for Obama and friends’ claims that “if you like your health plan, you can keep it.” But the reality is, anyone who followed the law knew this was a lie. It was clear that the requirements were being upped, including identical coverage/pricing for men and women, full coverage of the “10 essential benefits,” a laundry-list of preventative care, and other plan design requirements which substantially increase the cost, beyond the cost/pricing issues of limiting age differentiation and requiring that the healthy subsidize the already-sick. It was also clear that the grandfathering built into the law was so limited as to be nonexistent. Perhaps pundits and policymakers hadn’t recognized that insurers would try to hold down costs by creating limited networks, obliging people to leave doctors with whom they’d already established relationships, but the basic facts were well known.
So it’s been clear for a long time that Obama has been lying.
Maybe he really was supremely ignorant of the mechanics of the health care, in the same way as he didn’t know that Merkel was being spied upon, and didn’t know that Benghazi was at risk, and the like. But I find that highly improbable — and I’d really rather believe our president is a liar than stunningly ignorant of major issues. (* Also — remember when Obama “evolved” on gay marriage, and everyone knew that he supported gay marriage all along, and his supporters were perfectly A-OK with the fact that he was lying before, out of political expediency? And there was, and is, a significant undercurrent of acknowledgement by ACA supporters that lying was politically expedient, and therefore a worthy thing to do.)
So why is the media only waking up to this now? Probably because, had they called Obama on this when he first made the claim, it would have imperiled the law. Now it’s too late, and maybe a bit safer to report on this without it impacting their policy preferences.
And what do we, and what should Republicans, do about it?
To a certain extent, there’s nothing to be done. Yes, it can be milked as much as possible to try to get the American public to understand that the Republican’s political opponents are liars, both now and at election time, but don’t you think that we’re all conditioned to believe that politicians are lying, anyway?
What’s more disheartening is the extent to which it impacts other issues which require trust. “Give illegals amnesty now, and we promise we’ll enforce the border/workplace restrictions later” should be out the window — but Drudge, at least, keeps linking to House leaders talking about “immigration reform” as a short-term agenda item, which I have to admit, moves them further into the “untrustworthy” column (and I so liked Paul Ryan in the past!). “We need to raise taxes, but trust us, we’ll only use the proceeds for good and worthy reasons like reducing the deficit.” Plenty of other situations in which moving forward on needed legislation requires trust — and if Republicans trust Obama and the Democrats at this point, they’re either fools or they actually share the Dems’ objectives and are not trustworthy themselves.
Which is deeply unfortunate. Our political system is broken, and just getting brokener.
(Up next on the to-do list: are the Illinois Republicans showing any signs of getting their act together? Or are we going to be living in Madiganistan for another four years?)
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