Valerie Jarrett: Obamacare doesn’t force you off your plan; your insurance company does, by complying with Obamacare! « Hot Air

Valerie Jarrett: Obamacare doesn’t force you off your plan; your insurance company does, by complying with Obamacare! 

Valerie Jarrett: Obamacare doesn’t force you off your plan; your insurance company does, by complying with Obamacare!

posted at 10:01 pm on October 28, 2013 by Mary Katharine Ham

It’s just one tweet, but the sheer mendacity requires its own post. With the media finally in “now it can be told” mode since Obamacare passed and President Obama was reelected, pretty much everyone is admitting what all of us knew four years ago— that no, not everyone would be able to keep their plans if they liked their plans. And, yes, the Obama administration knew it just as sure as its critics did.
It was a lie and an obvious one, but the administration, much of the media, and Obamacare supporters happily acted as if it were true and happily smeared those who suggested otherwise. Tonight, the president’s right-hand woman tries the lie again, even as it’s demonstrably unraveling before the nation’s eyes.
Let’s try to walk through this inanity. There’s nothing in Obamacare that forces people out of their health plans. Instead, Jarrett asserts, insurance companies are just deciding to change their plans, throwing people off their current coverage.
She leaves out the part where Obamacare legally requires all health insurance plans to include a certain number of benefits that was above and beyond what many more, ahem, affordable plans offered, thereby making certain plans illegal. Many of those plans were plans that people liked and were assured they could keep. Obamacare offered a “grandfathering” clause, which the administration later eviscerated after it had served its political purpose, ensuring even more people would lose their current coverage. So, no change is required by you under Obamacare unless your insurance company goes and changes your existing plan to comply with Obamacare.
Update: This isn’t just one yes-woman’s delusion. It’s a talking point. Unbelievable:
Even the most reliably hacky Obamacare supporters have at least conceded that people are losing their old plans because of Obamacare. They spin it with the notion that these new plans are way better, so why would you have liked that dumb old plan anyway (which fit within your family’s budget and served you well)? But the act of spinning requires at least some reckoning with the truth.
What level of denial and/or mendacity is necessary to tweet this? What confidence that the media will be there to cover your lies? This is the mindset of the people surrounding President Obama, and because no one’s ever held accountable for screwing up, this is the mindset of those who are “fixing” Obamacare’s problems.
In this case, I think Jarrett’s confidence in media to toe her line is misplaced. The dam seems to be breaking, at long last, on this falsehood. But who could blame her for thinking it’d hold up? This is the level of compliance she’s used to.
Sadly, the truth comes too late for all those losing the plans they liked. They can use their cancellation letters to refute Jarrett’s lie, as one of my Twitter friends did, but it’s cold comfort. Maybe they should all CC Politifact:
Charles Cooke of National Review was refuting Jarrett’s tweet tonight when he attracted a response from a liberal Obamacare defender:
Total B.S., meet low-information voter. That’s why they do it. But this time, the truth is arriving in thousands of mailboxes, and costing each family thousands. It’s going to get harder to convince them they’re not seeing what they’re seeing.