One cannot help but be struck by the monstrous incongruities between the hopes Obamacare engendered and the grubby realities of its passage, implementation, and results. The ACA was sold with messianic visions and utopianism. Nancy Pelosi promised Obamacare would free us from work – we could all quit our jobs and take up the violin. But these were just tactics, deliberate strategies to neuter opposition to the bill. In this series, the Truth Squad exposes the methods used to pass Obamacare (the lies, the deceit, the orgy of lobbying). We also hold Obamacare’s proponents accountable for the results (e.g., the botched roll-out). It was not the “stupidity of the American voter” that allowed Obamacare to pass. We had a huge game run on us by masters of deceit who should never be trusted with public policy again.
The page references are from the 2015 book America’s Bitter Pill by Steven Brill.
Part 1 – Special Interests
Part 2 – Deceit
Part 3 – Botched Rollout
Part 4 – Other Perversities
Deceit
- Can’t Keep Your Plan (How Do You Lie to Millions of People?)- The regulations regarding the grandfathering were published in the Federal Register in June 2010, shortly after Obamacare was signed into law. The insurance companies noticed immediately, but it didn’t hit the general public until three years later. It caused a firestorm when NBC reported the President was wrong when he promised the public 19 times ‘you can keep your plan.’ According to author Brill, the President admitted he should have known at the time he was making these promises that tight grandfathering rules had already been written that would cause millions of people to lose their health insurance policies. (pp. 365-368) The hard line on grandfathering was the brainchild of Jeanne Lambrew in the HHS Office of Health Reform who hated insurance companies, especially ones that sold low-cost insurance (p. 146).
- Comment: Here’s what’s wrong with Brill’s version of events, which casts President Obama as merely negligent, not a liar: If President Obama was so outraged at his underlings’ doings, he easily could have reversed their decision, but he didn’t. He let the grandfathering rules stand, causing millions to lose their plans. Either he’s a liar or content to have others make a liar out of him, take your pick. The bottom line is he deceived the American people when he told them 19 times they could keep their plans.
- Similarly, the President knew that his promise to the American people that ‘if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor’ was a lie as early as 2009, before the bill was passed. A memo described how money would be saved through ‘narrow networks’, i.e., limiting the choices of doctors and hospitals people would have under Obamacare exchange plans. (p. 115) Untold numbers of people lost their doctor because of the deliberate decision to embrace narrow networks.
- Just prior to rollout, an Obama official touted the notion that premiums for the first year would be lower than CBO had estimated. He failed to mention that narrow networks made this possible. A reporter tried to ask about it, but the official deflected the question. (p. 317)
- Proponents of the ‘public option’ wanted the game to be rigged to drive private insurers out of business with single-payer being the ultimate goal. (pp. 87-88)
- The AMA was promised a permanent ‘doc fix’ for Medicare reimbursements, but the provision was left out of the bill to make the CBO scoring work. (p. 401) [Note – If it had been included at the time Obamacare was being considered, it would have added hundreds of billions of dollars to CBO’s scoring and made passage of the bill politically impossible. Hiding the ball solved that problem.]
- Costs
- No serious argument can be made that Obamacare is about cutting costs. Lawmakers knew from the beginning that Obamacare was going to be about ‘universal’ coverage, not cost control. (p. 80)
- Obamacare gives subsidies to pay the same exorbitant prices that were the problem in the first place. (book jacket)
- The ‘bend the cost curve’ mantra was dazzling and started circulating early, but it was a joke from the start. Cost-cutting measures included forcing doctors to use electronic health records (but that has already cost the government $20 billion through 2014 with no end in sight), cuts to Medicare (oxygen and wheelchairs), and hospital readmission penalties (which would later prove to be problematic). The supposed savings were to total $300 billion over 10 years, a figure completely overwhelmed by Obamacare’s subsidies and Medicaid expansion. (p. 84) Obamacare bent the cost curve all right – UP, not down.
- Despite the continuing charade about costs, President Obama made public pronouncements about how a failure to rein in costs would bankrupt the government: “If people think we’re simply gonna take everyone who’s not insured and load them up into a system … the federal government will be bankrupt. State governments will be bankrupt. I’m talking to you liberal bleeding hearts out there. Don’t think we can solve this problem without tackling costs.”(p. 89)
- President Obama changed his tune later. Despite signing a law that effectively loaded uninsured people on to the system without seriously tackling costs, the President claimed in an interview with the author that the ACA will help lower the deficit. (p. 467)
- In an interview with the author, President Obama repeated the lie that Medicaid expansion helps “those who need it most” when, in fact, it cynically pushes government dependency into the middle class. (p. 467) (n.b. – Brill makes the same specious claim Medicaid expansion is about the poor on p. 281). The President’s statement would have been true if Max Baucus had stuck with expanding the program to the federal poverty line, but the law as passed pushed eligibility to 138 percent of FPL. (p. 75)
- In an interview with the author, President Obama expressed concern that Medicare should be there for seniors as promised, but he’s the one who chopped $716 billion out of Medicare to fund Obamacare. (p. 469)
- Officials testified before Congress that all website problems would be fixed before the launch. (p. 295) One later acknowledged that his testimony was not truthful (p. 296)
- One day after launch, even though officials would lie about it continuously thereafter, they knew only six people had enrolled. (p. 335)
- Fitting the pattern of lying about enrollment numbers, an administration official said during the early days of enrollment that they had planned for 50,000-60,000 concurrent users but were experiencing problems from there being 250,000 on healthcare.gov at one time. Actually, they had only planned for 10,000 and didn’t even meet that target. (p. 349)
- The small business (SHOP) exchanges had to be jettisoned from the initial launch because they not ready, despite Sebelius’ lies to Congress they would be up and running “in every market in the country.” (pp. 296-297)