At the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, who has been the wire service's lead reporter on Affordable Care Act matters for years, came up with a new euphemism to describe the now-broken unconditional guarantee made dozens of times by President Obama, at least 27 Senate Democrats, and many House Democrats, namely that "If you like your plan-doctor-provider, you can keep your plan-doctor-provider."
In a Saturday evening writeup whose purpose seemed to be to reassure Americans that they will come to accept the government forcing you to buy state-approved health insurance just as they have other government mandates and intrusions (wait til you see the parallels he attempts), the AP reporter told readers that the left's "you can keep it" guarantee was just one of many "inflated promises" (bolds and numbered tags are mine):
OBAMA STRUGGLES TO SAVE HIS CHERISHED HEALTH LAW
President Barack Obama's health care law risks coming unglued because of his administration's bungles and his own inflated promises. [1]
To avoid that fate, Obama needs breakthroughs on three fronts: the cancellations mess, technology troubles and a crisis in confidence among his own supporters.
Working in his favor are pent-up demands for the program's benefits [2] and an unlikely collaborator in the insurance industry. [3]
But even after Obama gets the enrollment website working, count on new controversies. On the horizon is the law's potential impact on job-based insurance. Its mandate that larger employers offer coverage will take effect in 2015. [4]
For now, odds still favor the Affordable Care Act's survival. But after making it through the Supreme Court, a presidential election, numerous congressional repeal votes and a government shutdown, the law has yet to win broad acceptance. [5]
... Other government mandates have taken root in American culture after initial resistance. It may be a simplistic comparison, but most people automatically fasten their seat belts nowadays when they get in the car. Few question government-required safety features such as air bags [6], even if those add to vehicle costs.
(Kaiser Family Foundation "insurance expert" Larry) Levitt says the ACA may yet have that kind of influence on how health insurance is viewed. "An expectation that everybody should have health insurance is now a topic of conversation in families," he says. [7]
That conversation was interrupted by news that the HealthCare.gov website didn't work and that people with coverage were getting cancellation notices despite Obama's promise that you can keep your insurance.
Notes:
[1] — Note that the AP reporter wouldn't identify what those "inflated promises" (i.e., lies) are.
[2] — Of course, there's "pent-up demand" for free or nearly free government-paid services. So?
[3] — The health insurance industry's naive belief that it could survive long-term after getting in bed with a hostile government is a classic and very unfortunate example of short-term thinking trumping long-term common sense.
[4] — "Somebody" wrote about the "impact" of employers losing their grandfathered coverage which was revealed in "a leaked document" way back in June 2010. That "somebody" was the AP's Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar. Note that in today's report, he didn't specify what the "potential impact" is. It's the wave of "you can keep your plan" unconditional guarantee breakage in employer-provided plans.
[5] — Better phrasing: "The law has yet to overcome the fierce opposition of a majority of Americans."
[6] — Really? Air bags and seat belts? All these examples prove is that relatively benign mandates don't necessarily lead the population subjected to them to tolerate ones that sharply curtail fundamental freedoms.
[7] – If it's such a "topic of conversation," why did the Obamabots at Organizing for Action feel compelled to produce an absolutely hideous video about how parents need to "have the talk" (about health insurance) with their adult children?
Predictably, Alonso-Zaldivar didn't make the obvious observation that after all the talk of how the law can't be changed during the 17 percent partial government shutdown, Obama and his administration are unilaterally making significant changes to it on the fly. As Andrew McCarthy essentially pointed out yesterday at National Review in discussing why insurance companies would be "insane" to take back individual plan clients without the Affordable Care Act itself being revised by Congress, these moves break another pair of promises — the ones Obama made to uphold the Constitution on Inauguration Day in 2009 and 2013.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
