Dozens of times (that we know of) over his campaign to pass ObamaCare and to win re-election, President Obama lied to the American people about being able to keep the health insurance they like. But that lie has only been replaced with another: the lie that these cancellations will be limited to the 5% of Americans in the individual marketplace — when the truth is that these cancellations have only just begun.
Over at National Review, in a piece appropriately titled “Lying About Lies,” Michael Tanner reports that the same ObamaCare formula currently wiping out the individual market is about to rain hell on the employer-based market. The result will be that tens of millions of policies will be wiped out.
This is a secret that is and always has been hiding in plain sight.
As far back as last March, the media dutifully reported that the CBO reported that these cancellations were coming. So the media knew Obama was lying during the campaign but never said a word to spread this truth — oh, except to call Mitt Romney a liar for telling the truth.
All these Democrats and members of the elite media now pretending they don’t or didn’t know… Please.
Just as the media knew Obama was lying about people in the individual market being able to keep their insurance, the media also know that the same apocalypse looms for the employer-based market. It is not conservatives making this estimate, it is the Congressional Budget Office. [emphasis mine]
But the same conditions that are causing the cancellation of individual policies will eventually result in the cancellation of millions of employment-based policies as well. The only reason that hasn’t happened yet is that the employer mandate was postponed for a year, so employer plans don’t yet have to be ACA-compliant. But they will. Even the Congressional Budget Office estimates that as many as 20 million workers will lose their current employer-sponsored plans. Combine that with those losing individual plans, and more than 30 million Americans cannot keep their current insurance.
ObamaCare’s latest trick is the “junk plan hustle.” Over and over, we keep hearing about how our White House overlords are doing Americans a favor by canceling the insurance they like and replacing it with “appropriate” health plans. But most of those plans are not junk plans. That is just another lie the White House is telling, and the media are letting them get away with it.
The media know the White House is lying about this junk plan nonsense because the ObamaCare guidelines for what isn’t a “junk plan” only includes 2% of the policies currently in existence.
According to HealthPocket, a health-insurance consulting firm, fewer than 2 percent of individual plans on offer today meet all ACA requirements. The most frequent reason for noncompliance was not a failure to cover hospitalization, as the administration has suggested, but not providing pediatric care, including vision and dental care for children. A worthwhile benefit, perhaps, but if you are childless, it’s hard to see how lacking such a benefit makes your policy subpar.
This is why other serious think tanks believe that before this nightmare is over, up to 93 million people could lose the insurance Obama promised they could keep.
In order to buy time, Obama, Democrats, and the media are trying to con the American people into believing that the rolling ObamaCare catastrophe is compartmentalized to just 5% of the population. This conspiracy of silence is all about trying to contain through a lie of omission what is a legitimate reason for the public to panic as soon as they realize that … they are next.
Obama is not sorry for lying. And the media are not sorry for covering up that lie for three years.
The phase we are in now is nothing more than a 2.0 version of that exact same lie.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC