Monday night on her Fox News program, Megyn Kelly played a clip of President Obama going beyond the now-infamous "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan" promise. Earlier Monday, as Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters noted, Lisa Myers and Hannah Rappleye at NBC News revealed that the Obama administration knew three years ago that "more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them."
At the 0:59 mark of the video which follows (HT Mediaite), viewers will see Kelly introduce and then replay Obama's February 2010 promise that "any insurance you have will be grandfathered in," even if it's an "Acme Insurance, just a high deductible catastrophic plan":
Transcript of relevant portion:
MEGYN KELLY: Let me just tell you what happened.
They met. They had the health care summit. John Kyl, a Republican senator, said to him, at that summit, he said, "Mr. President, I'm concerned about the indiviual market. Because, you're going to require that these policies offer all these goodies in 'em. And that's gonna jack up rates. Or the insurers (companies) are just going to say "I'm not going to do it; I'm cancelling these policies."
And the President said, "No-no-no-no-no, I'm going to grandfather all those policies, and people are going to be protected."
Here was the President in February 2010:
BARACK OBAMA, Feb. 25, 2010: Actually, any insurance that you currently have would be grandfathered in so you could keep it. So you could decide not to get in the exchange the better plan. I could keep my Acme Insurance, just a high deductible catastrophic plan. I would not be required to get the better one.
KELLY: Four months later, an administration memo talking about how over 70% of the individual insurance market was going to get cancelled.
And the President in 2012 ... came out and reiterated what he said that "If you like your plan, you can keep it."
We now know that Kathleen Sebelius, as Myers and Rappleye reported, "wrote regulations that narrowed that (grandfathering) provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date -- the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example -- the policy would not be grandfathered" — thereby breaking Obama's specific promise, as seen in the transcript and video, that "any insurance you currently have," ""you could keep."
So Obama's promise about keeping your plan specifically (and contemptuously) cited the ability to keep "a high deductible catastrophic plan" was obviously not merely about plans with supposedly acceptable minimum coverage.
As the NBC reporting pair found, it was a promise broken within months after it was made, and then falsely reinforced in 2012.
An especially bitter irony in all of this is that the vaunted Obamacare exchange plans bear a stronger resemblance to the "Acme" plans he ridiculed than they do to the kind of coverage most workers at larger companies are used to receiving.
On September 30, the Associated Press called Obama's core "if you like your plan, you can keep your plan" meme "an empty promise, made repeatedly." How will AP and others in the press treat what NBC has exposed, and Kelly's extension of that work?
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
