Now that the falsehood of President Obama’s sweeping claim that everyone who liked their pre-Obamacare insurance plan would be able to retain it under his healthcare law is beginning to sink in, the latest spin from the White House is to push the blame on “bad apple” insurance companies. Their “crime?” Offering health insurance plans deemed unaccaptable by Obamacare which customers wanted to purchase.
Time will tell whether the left-leaning “mainstream” press will begin challening the White House on this latest dodge but one person who was willing to do so was Fox News host Megyn Kelly who went after congressman Frank Pallone (D-NJ) on her program Wednesday night. “Why do you get to decide what’s lousy?” she asked during the heated segment.
As NB’s Tom Blumer has been noting repeatedly, while it is true that plans in effect before Obamacare was signed into law were allowed to be “grandfathered” in, the law is very strict about how almost any sort of change in such plans (many of which were mandated by the law such as a minimum percentage of premiums to be spent on patient care) would cause these lower-cost plans to lose their grandfathered status and thus become in violation of the standards created by the law.
So while it is true that Obamacare did not literally force the private insurers to cancel their non-compliant plans, it certainly is true that the law could be construed to have that effect.
Watch the segment to see Kelly challenge Pallone on both the old spin and the new spin.
