Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) admitted during the November 17 edition of This Week on ABC that the president and fellow Democrats knew that Americans would lose their health insurance. "We all knew," she said.
When the president uttered his now infamous lie: “If you like your health insurance, you can keep it” (36 times), did Democrats feel even a twinge of guilt as they nodded and applauded? Just once one of them could have mentioned the truth. “Ahem, Mr. President, you really should be saying – if I like your insurance, you can keep it.”
Now that millions of Americans in the individual market have lost their insurance, the truth is out. Now that millions of Americans in the individual market have lost their insurance, the truth is out. The Administration predicted 80 million Americans who get insurance at work are next in line to experience cancellation letters and the prospect of having to buy more expensive policies through the dysfunctional Obamacare exchanges.
The President is now saying that those who have lost or are about to lose their health insurance can keep it for another year. Lucky us. Even as he makes the new pledge he is threatening to veto a guarantee passed by the House of Representatives that Americans people can keep their insurance for as long as they want. It is no wonder that a Quinnipiac University poll recently found that 52% of the American public believes President Obama is not honest or trustworthy. Even liberal comedian Jon Stewart has called the president “somewhat dishonest” about healthcare.
“Somewhat dishonest” is nice way of saying President Obama deceived the American people. The Oxford Dictionary defines deceit as “the action or practice of deceiving someone by concealing or misrepresenting the truth.” It is clear now that the President and allies in Congress knowingly and intentionally misrepresented the truth in order to sell the law to the skeptical public.
Misrepresenting isn’t the same as misspeaking as President Obama and allies originally contended. Saying one as visited 57 states or adding an extra syllable to the word “nuclear” are examples of a harmless misspoken word. Misrepresenting the truth isn’t like accidently breaking a pledge. When President HW Bush said, “Read my lips, no new taxes,” he meant it. He later reneged on that pledge and paid the price for breaking his promise. By contrast, when President Obama said we could keep our insurance, he knew that some 93 million would likely lose their coverage.
Misrepresenting the truth isn’t just an exaggeration like Al Gore’s statement “I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” Gore had pushed legislation to fund commercial application of the nascent internet. He was guilty of hyperbole not deceit.
In the history of political lies, this misrepresentation belongs with Nixon’s “in all of my years of public life I have never obstructed justice.” However, whereas Nixon and friends paid the consequence for the lying forty years ago, the American people are paying the price for the current political lie about Obamacare.
The truth is out but the fallout has just begun.