Amazing stories of Obamacare

President Obama promoted Obamacare with a relentlessly repeated set of misrepresentations regarding that 2,700-page bill: “If you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.” He set some kind of an indoor record for falsity per word with these whoppers. Even so, the American people caught on to the game before long.

The misrepresentation and misdirection continue in the administrations’s campaign against Catholic institutions in public statements concerning the “preventive services” regulation compelling the provision of contraception, abortifacients and sterilization. The infringement of religious liberty in the name of Obamacare is an amazing story, but it is of course not the only one.

Now comes the Obama administration’s Medicare swindle. Jeffrey Anderson explains in the new issue of the Weekly Standard:

Under the implementation schedule stipulated in Obamacare, many seniors would either lose their [Medicare Advantage] plans, or learn that they are going to lose them, before the election that will likely decide Obamacare’s—and Obama’s—fate.

Anticipating a senior revolt, the administration took action. It ran millions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-funded TV ads featuring Andy Griffith saying things like, “That new health care law sure sounds good for all of us on Medicare!” It mailed out full-color, taxpayer-funded propaganda brochures singing the same tune. It repeatedly claimed (and continues to claim) that money taken out of Medicare to fund Obamacare would—magically—also stay in Medicare and be used to extend its solvency.

But the administration didn’t stop there. Instead, it launched an $8.35 billion “demonstration project” to postpone the vast majority of Obamacare’s Medicare Advantage cuts until after what Obama likes to call his “last election.” In truth, this isn’t really a demonstration project at all. It’s something closer to the opposite: an attempt to keep Obamacare’s effects from being demonstrated until it’s too late for voters to respond.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has identified this “demonstration project” as a sham….

This is a story of brazen administration action of dubious legality undertaken with transparently corrupt purposes. Yet it has received amazingly little coverage. You might almost think we lacked a free press or something.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses