Lies of Obamacare: McClatchy edition

Yesterday I wrote about Obama’s “Five percent solution,” the lie he tells to mitigate the big “If you like your health plan, you can keep it” lie. According to Obama, the big lie affects only a fraction of those in the market of individual insurance. “We’re talking about five percent of the population,” Obama stressed in is interview with Chuck Todd.

Obama has been incredibly successful peddling this particular lie. In columns critical of Obama last week, the Chicago Sun-Times’s Lynn Sweet accepted the veracity of the “five percent” assertion as did Slates’s John Dickerson. These are good columns by knowledgeable political reporters, yet the reporters are clueless regarding the demonstrable falsity of Obama’s “five percent” assertion. In a not so good post at the Washington Post Fix blog, Chris Cillizza and Sean Sullivan make the same mistake.

John exposed the five percent solution as a lie in “Lies of Obamacare, documented.” For those purchasing health care in the group insurance market, the day of reckoning has been delayed by virtue of Obama’s illegal postponement (in essence) of the employer mandate for one year. Now come Kevin Hall and Anita Kumar of McClatchy’s Washington bureau to cover some of the material John reviewed and deliver the news to consumers of the mainstream media: “Analysis: Tens of millions could be forced out of health insurance they had.” McClatchy leaves out the context of the five percent solution, but it is an addition to the reportage that should render the cluelessness of Sweet, Dickerson, Cillizza et al. more difficult to maintain.

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