Politifact "Lie of the Year"

5M policies cancelled, maybe 200,000 new ones issued. Yeah, right, looks like someone needs a calculator to figure out the net.

 

I'd be willing to grant he wasn't lying because he didn't bother to read the law or even the summary bullet points. While the Democrats were courting at least one republican so they could claim (LIE!) the law was bipartisan, it underwent a lot of transformation. I remember Obama touting a public option that never materialized in the final law.

I don't think he was lying about the public option. He was just talking about something that wasn't ObamaCare. Call it his wish list, fine.

But was he so disengaged that he didn't care what was in it as it was being drafted? There was no White House representation in the process? Nobody briefed him on current status and updates along the way? Or that nobody briefed him for the past 5 years on his signature "achievement" since 2010? Or that when Sebelius made public statements (she read the bill after it passed) that millions would lose their plans that maybe one of his speech writers or advisors might warn him the "period" statement was untrue.

Sorry to say it, but he lied. Lied us into a terrible and costly program with a feel good title and punishing consequences.

 

Medicare/Medicaid policies count.

 

Reason.com for the win.

http://reason.com/archives/2013/12/16/the-death-of-obamas-noble-lie

On October 30, the president himself attempted to shift the blame onto "bad-apple insurers," and he suggested that the cancellations of what his administration was calling "junk" plans were affecting "fewer than 5 percent of Americans." The day before, top presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett tweeted, "FACT: Nothing in #Obamacare forces people out of their health plans. No change is required unless insurance companies change existing plans."

As late as November 4, two days after The Wall Street Journal published a devastating account of how White House advisers had internally debated softening Obama's absolute claim about being able to keep your health plan and doctor, the president was trying to wriggle off the hook by rewriting his own rhetorical history: "Now, if you had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it if it hasn't changed since the law passed." Italics mine, to emphasize the lie about the lie.

By this time, even the president's defenders were categorizing Obama's falsehood as, at best, "a 'noble lie' in the Platonic sense of the term," as Salon's Brian Beutler put it on November 7. But even at that late date, "the real lying liars" (in Beutler's phrasing) were, of course, on the other side: "Noble lies have in many ways defined the debate over the Affordable Care Act, but the vast majority of them have been lies conservatives told in a failed effort to nix reform."

All that pettifoggery was rendered moot on the evening of November 7, when the president kinda-sorta apologized for misleading the country. NBC interviewer Chuck Todd asked Obama "Do you feel like you owe these folks an apology for misleading them?" The president, with much hemming and hawing within the ellipses, said this: "I regret very much that…we weren't as clear as we needed to be in terms of the changes that were taking place.…Even though it's a small percentage of folks who may be disadvantaged, you know, it means a lot to them. And it's scary to them. And I am sorry that they, you know, are finding themselves in this situation, based on assurances they got from me."

As reason's Peter Suderman pointed out at the time, the apology itself was not technically accurate. "People aren't 'finding themselves' in 'this situation'-the situation of having insurance plans they liked canceled-because of Obama's 'assurances,' " Suderman wrote at reason.com. "They are finding themselves in that situation because of legislation that his party crafted, rules his administration drafted, and a bill that he promoted vigorously and then signed into law. His assurances misled people about what would happen under that law, but did not cause the plans to be terminated."

The estimated scores of millions of eventual health-plan cancellations that Americans will soon face are not some weird unintended consequence of ObamaCare. They are fundamental to making the law work as written. The Affordable Care Act relies on previously uninsured young people to overpay for coverage they don't need, and for previously insured adults to pay for health contingencies they will never face, be it childbirth for men or pediatric dental care for grandparents. That is what is supposed to allow more people to be covered and to keep overall rates in check. Since making people's health insurance more expensive is not particularly popular, Obama lied about it, and not only when he claimed you could keep your plan and your doctor.

In fact, the president promised at least 15 times while running for president in 2008 that his health insurance reform would reduce premiums by an average of $2,500 per family. In May 2009, he said the law would "end up saving $2 trillion," leading to "lower premiums." The White House blog in November 2009 featured such headlines as "Objective Analysis Shows Reform will Help Small Businesses, Lower Premiums for American Families" and "CBO Confirms That Families Will Save Money Under Health Reform."

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/12/16/the-biggest-pinocchios-of-2013/

The biggest Pinocchios of 2013

#1 “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it.”
#3 “The Capitol Hill janitors just got a pay cut”
#5 “The day after Benghazi happened, I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism.”
#7 “I opposed the invasion of Iraq” (John Kerry)

 

Nominee for biggest S2 Pinocchio of the day: presenting this list with #2, 4, 6 and 8 omitted.

barfo

 

4 if the top 7 and 3 of the top 5 is significant. Did I somehow imply there wasn't a 2,4,6, and 8? Nope.