"Keep Your Own Doctor" Untrue From the Start

National Review’s Rich Lowry explains the Obama falsehoods.

To say that President Barack Obama is on the record telling Americans they can keep their current health insurance is an understatement. He repeated the assurance so many times during the health-care debate that it was almost a verbal tic.

He was stirring: “Americans must have the freedom to keep whatever doctor and health-care plan they have.” He was adamant: “If you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.” He was clear: “Let me be clear: If you like your doctor or health-care provider, you can keep them. If you like your health-care plan, you can keep that, too.”

He had to keep repeating his promise, since there was so much bad information out there. “No matter what you’ve heard,” he said in a weekly radio address in August 2009, “if you like your doctor or health-care plan, you can keep it.”

Practically no Obama speech was complete without this disclaimer. He must have felt sorely tempted to tack it on to his Cairo speech to the Arab world and his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. It must have been the first words on his lips when he arose in the morning and the last when he retired in the evening. When it came to existing health insurance, he portrayed himself as the principled and tireless defender of the realm.

Rarely has a major domestic program been sold on the basis of a premise so patently untrue. No matter what you’ve heard from the president of the United States, hundreds of thousands of people in states around the country are now receiving notices that their insurance is getting canceled. It raises the question of how the president could be so wrong about a basic element of his own signature initiative.