by Smitty (h/t House of Eratosthenes)
I’m going to risk irritating Andrew Cline at the American Spectator just a tad bit by rejecting this assertion:
Campaigning in Des Moines, Iowa, yesterday, the President repeated his biggest health care reform whopper: You can keep your current health insurance. Here is what he said:
“There’s nothing in the bill that says you have to change the health insurance you’ve got right now. If you were already getting health insurance on your job, then that doesn’t change.”
Yet hours before he uttered that line, the Boston Globe reported that Harvard Pilgrim Health Care was canceling its Medicare Advantage coverage specifically because of new regulations imposed by Obama’s health care law.
RTWT. Cline makes a good case that the President “isn’t being honest” and has “repeated. . .whopper[s]”.
Later, Cline allows, emphasis mine:
Politifact and others have rated as technically true Obama’s claim that “the government is not going to make you change plans under health reform.” But that is not true, either. The law mandates that health insurers change the coverage they offer. Insurers have to offer coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and to policyholders’ children up to age 26. So technically, the law did change your health care plan.
As with questions of where he was born; is he Socialist; is he Muslim, this strikes me as playing the game on Leftist ground. Who cares whether the scatalogical sandwich was served on rye or pumpernickel: we know the sort of sandwich it is. Whether the alteration of the health care plan occurred in the active or passive voice of the verb ‘change’, plus $5, will get you some foo-foo at Starbucks. But it won’t get you into a clinic.
The modern Progressive bureaucracy is founded on complexity.
I can’t find the quotation at the moment, but I think it was Thomas Sowell who said words to the effect that “The reason we needed a 2,500 page bill was so that Congress could describe in great detail how the system will be unfair to people.” In blindly acceding liberty to Congress these decades, We The People have allowed too much complexity to creep in. The test of leadership in the next Congress will be to cut not just the budget, but the number of Federal weasel-crats ripping up American liberty.
Thus, attempting to pin claims of dishonesty on just the President misses the broader point that the entire system is geared toward untruth.
