A video has surfaced from the presidential campaign trail in May 2008 that shows Michelle Obama talking about the sacrifices that Americans would have to make in order to achieve her husband’s health care goals.
The future First Lady was speaking at a meeting of military families to highlight the cost of war for those back at home. Her remarks have been referred to in several Internet postings but no video has surfaced until now.
Mrs. Obama says:
It’s going to cost us something as a society to say, ‘We can’t tolerate millions of people uninsured. We can’t tolerate it.’ But in order for all of us to get a little bit more, a whole bunch of us are going to have to give up a little something that we have. And that’s not, sort of, what we’ve been taught…
Alright, so if you have a leader like Barack, who is saying, ‘Yes, we know how much this is gonna cost–it’s gonna cost us billions, but we can do it,’ what are we willing to sacrifice to make that sure we have the resources to do it?…
But that’s–that’s the mindset that has to change, with what does it mean to live in a society, what does it mean to be an American, and what kind of sacrifice do we all have to make?…
What Barack says: ‘We all have the work to do,’ you know. It’s not just about changing the person in the White House, but it’s about changing out mindset, what we’re willing to sacrifice, even our own individual selves.
Ultimately, President Barack Obama did not sell the Affordable Care Act by talking about the sacrifices that Americans would have to make but by what they would not have to give up, and the money they would save.
The reality of Obamacare has now begun to hit home, and Americans feel the president lied to them. Some liberal commentators have fretted that he ought–as Michelle Obama recommended–to have been honest about the costs. That, however, would have made the controversial legislation virtually impossible to pass.