Obama Cancels 'You Can Keep Your Plan' Promise: 'Just Shop Around'

In a speech at Boston’s Faneuil Hall on Wednesday afternoon, President Barack Obama discarded his now-infamous broken promise: “If you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance.” Instead, he offered a new promise: “You will be getting a better deal,” the president told health insurance consumers. 

He blamed insurance companies, not Obamacare, for the canceled policies:

Now, if you had one of these substandard plans before the Affordable Care Act became law, and you really like that plan, you were able to keep it. That’s what I said when I was running for office. That was part of the promise we made. But ever since the law was passed, if insurers decided to downgrade or cancel the substandard plans, what we said under the law is that you have got to replace them with quality, comprehensive coverage because that, too, was a central premise of the Affordable Care Act from the very beginning…

So if you’re getting one of these letters [canceling your insurance policy], just shop around in the new marketplace. That’s what it’s for…

For the fewer than 5% of Americans who buy insurance on your own, you will be getting a better deal. So anyone peddling the motion that insurers are canceling people’s plan without mentioning that almost all the insurers are encouraging people to join better plans with the same carrier and stronger benefits and stronger protections, while others will be able to get better plans with new carriers through the marketplace, and then many will get new help to pay for these better plans and make them actually cheaper–if you leave that stuff out, you’re being grossly misleading, to say the least.

Ignoring evidence that the “better deal” is often far more expensive than existing plans, the president updated his promise without apologizing for misleading voters for years about the consequences of Obamacare. He also ignored the fact that companies were compelled by the law to change their plans to comply with new rules.

Obama, repeating a common Democrat talking point, also cited Medicare Part D to claim that Democrats had helped Republicans improve that policy, even though they had opposed it. However, as Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC) pointed out in Congress earlier Wednesday, Medicare Part D is voluntary–unlike Obamacare.