The exchange lumped all shoppers into two groups—those under 49 and those over 50. The first group got quotes based on what a healthy 27-year-old would pay and the older group what a 50-year-old pay. The actual prices for specific policies obtained from the websites of insurance companies were much higher, prompting an expert interviewed by CBS, which broke the story, to call this feature “incredibly misleading.” But the administration’s lies don’t end there.
President Obama had been claiming till as recently as last year that his law would force no one to give up coverage. “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” But the administration’s own internal communication shows that it knew back in 2010 that 12 to 93 million policy holders might well lose their policies.
That’s when Sebelius issued regulations grandfathering policies so long as they didn’t change. If insurers so much as inflation-adjusted premiums, they lost their protected status, becoming subject to Obamacare’s mandates requiring them to cover everything from maternity services for elderly couples to drug rehab for teetotalers.
All of this prompted even Washington Post’s “fact” checkers this week to give Obama Four Pinocchios.
The whole point of Obamacare—aka the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—was to protect patients from greedy insurers who lure them when they are healthy only to use some arcane fine print to jack prices or dump them when they fall sick.
But the administration has engaged in similar subterfuge, showing that the profit motive is not the only corrupter in human affairs. Partisanship, ideology and—above all—a president’s need to leave a legacy are even more so.
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