The Great Conflation

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Just got through watching President Obama lying on TV, and the method of his dishonesty is what fascinates me. He (and other liberals) engage in a sort of rhetorical prestidigitation, whereby health insurance is conflated with health care. In other words, the Democrats would have you believe, if you don’t have insurance, you just get sick and die. But what they never mention is that most people are healthy, and the vast majority of Americans — whether healthy or sick — had health insurance before ObamaCare was enacted.

If you were part of the X-million who did not have health insurance (those numbers were always estimates, and there was serious disagreement about how many were in the supposedly pathetic legion of The Uninsured), that didn’t mean you were doomed to die a painful death without benefit of medical care.

Most people without health insurance were healthy young people. But by relentlessly hyping the allegedly widespread misery of The Uninsured, liberals  sought to justify a complex new federal regulatory apparatus that changed health insurance for everybody — including people who already had insurance with which they were satisfied.

The President therefore promised that everybody who already had insurance could keep it, and further promised that their rates would not go up as a result of the new law. But he lied.

Now, the President is attempting to convince us that everything is just hunky-dory. People who continue to oppose this law, the President would have us believe, are against health care — that is to say, he is conflating this legislation with health care per se, so that if you are against this particular law, you’re pro-cancer or something.

That’s right: Republicans want people to get sick and die, because illness and death are the only alternatives to the President’s policy.

And we all remember what life was like before ObamaCare: Everybody was either sick or dead, except greedy Republicans, who made lucrative profits from their investments in Death, Inc.

As I say, the method of his dishonesty is fascinating.

 

36 comments

  1. I started to watch and had to switch off the TV after 1 minute – I can not stomach him at all. Thanks for watching for me!

    I listened to a few songs on YouTube and was further cheered up when I went over to Real Clear Politics to check the aggregated polls.

    Generic Congressional Vote:

    R’s 43.5/D’s 41.0

    Republicans up by 2.5

    President Obama Job Approval:

    39.5 Approve/55.9 Disapprove

    -16.1 Spread on Obama.

    Set a new low approval # today..

    Real Clear Politics – President Obama Job Approval

  2. My default assumption is that everything Obama says is a lie.

    That assumption has been amazingly (and yet discouragingly) correct.

  5. You have to admit though, his honesty is refreshing. It explains why the One felt compelled to lie his way through the passage of this travesty.

  6. “….a sort of rhetorical prestidigitation, whereby health insurance is conflated with health care.”

    —-

    …..and ‘health care’ with ‘health/existence’.

    People have a “fundamental right” to exist, not to be accommodated. Government is not a ‘Life Provider’.

  7. I actually do like Robert Reich, in the sense he would be a fun guy to debate over some beers. As a policy maker, however, he is both naive and wrong. I do not hear Bob speaking out recently on why Obamacare is a failure. So he is a creature of politics too.

  8. It makes sense for the government to nurture a commercially sound economy under which health insurance companies and health care providers can flourish and offer competitively priced health services to the nation. It is also eminently sensible for our government to provide some sort of safety net for the few that may fall through the cracks.

    It makes absolutely no sense for our government to co-opt the whole bloody thing. History has shown that governments are simply not capable of competently running commercially viable businesses.

  10. For the next 30 years, we will be reading how Obama “saved” health care. They will tell us how awful it was before Obama “fixed” health care. By the time they get through with the “health care” story, they’ll be reporting that no one had health care insurance until Obama invented it.

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