President Obama has repeatedly portrayed himself as standing up for average Joes and Julias, those citizens who through “no fault of their own” and having “played by the rules” find themselves facing economic insecurity or peril. Charles C. W. Cooke observes:
Oddly enough, however, [President Obama] has yet to mention the millions of responsible and admirable Americans who for years purchased health insurance on the individual market and who are now being thrown off their plans — through no fault of their own, of course, but by him and his central political achievement.
These are the 5 million — and counting — self-reliant types who have not merely suffered the indignity of being forcefully deprived of plans with which they were largely happy, but have also been forced to sit helplessly by while a parade of imperious, preening elites explained to them with barely concealed disdain that their choices could no longer be tolerated by the state.
“I am completely happy with my plan,” Margaret Davis of California lamented last week in a widely published letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein. Perhaps you are, Margaret. But the president is not, and in modern America that is all that matters. Now, for the same catastrophic plan, Davis faces an 88 percent increase in her premiums — and less coverage. Is this “fair”?
But people like Margaret Davis are precisely those people who were dutiful and played by the rules. It did them no good.
The other thing that is becoming abundantly clear is that most high-level Democrats knew all along that the president's keep-your-plan promise was impossible—how could it not happen? It was essential to ObamaCare to get people like Ms. Davis to relinquish their policies and buy policies that would cost more. It is almost impossible to give the people who echoed the president's now-discredited promise the benefit of the doubt.
Indeed it would would be difficult to read this exchange four years ago between Rep. Tom Price, a doctor, and Christina Romer, then chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers—unearthed by Byron York—and not come away feeling that Romer knew but was willing to obfuscate.
Dr. Keith Ablow has a disturbing opinion piece on why President Obama apparently found it easy to say things that weren’t true. In a nutshell, he doesn’t respect us.