It is now commonplace for critics of ObamaCare – the most thoroughly vindicated critics of any legislative initiative in modern history – to recall President Obama’s false promise that everyone who liked their health insurance plan and doctor would be able to keep them. But Obama wasn’t the only one making that promise.
Jason Mattera caught up with one of the Democrats who used to strongly echo Obama’s words, Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), and ask him what he thought of the Congressional Budget Office reports that project millions of Americans will lose their health care plans – either because the plan will boot them out, or cease to exist entirely.
You’ll notice there’s no more confident podium-rattling thunder from Rep. Engel. No, today you get a lot of uncomfortable throat-clearing and reedy excuses that we really just need to wait and see how it all shakes out, and maybe we’ll pass another zillion pages of laws to fix the fatal flaws in ObamaCare later. Jason is correct to note that Obama and his cronies weren’t saying, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan… unless you can’t, in which case we’ll see” back in 2009.
And how on Earth does Rep. Engel think some Band-Aid legislative fixes can fix core flaws in the ObamaCare concept, which are actually driving insurance companies out of the market? The problem here is that ObamaCare’s mandates are creating a hostile environment in which many insurance plans cannot survive, at least not in anything resembling their previous forms… and the system creates powerful incentives for providers and employers to drop coverage. You “fix” that by repealing the whole bloody mess, not by making it even more intrusive, complicated, and antithetical to American ideals.
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