It turns out you can’t keep your insurance even if you like it, because Obamacare makes it impractical for insurance companies to keep plans that don’t conform to the exchange guidelines. Progressives keep saying “but you’ll get a better plan on the exchange.” That assumes two things of Americans, 1) that they want to be on welfare (exchange plans are subsidized by tax dollars), and 2) that Americans want to pay for healthcare they don’t need, like a 27 year old single guy paying for maternity coverage. The Editors at National Review lay bare the many times the president “misspoke” to the American people about whether or not they’d be able to keep their plans.
The president misspoke: What he meant to say, a hundred or so times, was: “If I like your insurance, you can keep it.” You may like your insurance, but that is not quite good enough for the Obama administration.
Contrary to the endlessly repeated promise of the president and his political allies, millions and millions of Americans who do in fact like their current insurance policies are receiving notices that they will not be allowed to keep them. The White House and its media allies are working furiously to explain away this fact, but there is no explaining it away: The president lied about this. The word “lied” may be used too often in our political discourse, but the man lied, making willfully untrue statements with malice aforethought consistently and repeatedly. His aides and advisers had meetings and discussions about whether he should repeat this lie; campaign adviser Jim Margolis now allows, “Maybe this should have been parsed more carefully.” But parsing this more carefully would have precluded chanting the if-you-like-it-you-can-keep-it mantra, which is to say, it would have necessitated telling the truth that millions of Americans would lose policies they like.