Obama: It’s not #Obamacare’s fault “bad apple insurers” are cancelling your insurance

The arrogance and utter lack of self-awareness here is astonishing (hat tip):

President Obama tried a new tack Wednesday as he fought back against criticism of his Obamacare claims.

Fact-checkers and journalists have ruled that Obama wasn’t being truthful when he claimed that people who liked their insurance could keep it. Obama during a speech in Boston sought to cast the issue Wednesday as trying to weed out “bad apple insurers” who don’t provide enough coverage.

“One of the things health reform was designed to do was to help not only the uninsured but also the under-insured,” Obama said. “And there are a number of Americans, fewer than 5 percent of Americans, who’ve got cut-rate plans that don’t offer real financial protection in the event of a serious illness or an accident.

“Remember, before the Affordable Care Act, these bad apple insurers had free rein every single year to limit the care that you received or used minor pre-existing conditions to jack up your premiums or bill you into bankruptcy.”

Got that? It’s not HIS fault that his own law put the rules in place that essentially forced insurers to have to cancel so-called “bad” plans that most people were actually comfortable having.   Investors.com’s Betsy McCaughey corrects the record:

The fine print in his health law proves that [Obama] never intended to keep that promise.

Sec. 1251(a)(1) of the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) says that no one can be required to give up a plan in effect on March 23, 2010, when the law was passed. Those plans are “grandfathered.” But following that guarantee is a list of costly requirements that made it difficult for insurers to keep offering your plan.

It gets worse. Union plans were “grandfathered” with none of those fine-print tricks and exceptions. Sec. 1251(d).

The law also left open the possibility that the president could impose additional requirements on grandfathered plans (except union plans). Two months after ObamaCare was passed, the IRS, Department of Labor and Department of Health and Human Services — all reporting to the president — churned out hundreds of additional rules to make it even harder for grandfathered plans to survive.

The rule makers knew that they were turning the president’s promise into a flimflam. They estimated that up to 69% of individual plans and 89% of small-group plans would be canceled by the end of 2013 as a result of their rules (Federal Register, June 14, 2010).

The president understood that Americans don’t want socialized medicine or big government poking into their health care. So when he campaigned to pass ObamaCare, he told the public what they wanted to hear: that his plan would help the uninsured and leave everyone else alone. After all, 85% of Americans had insurance, and most were happy with it.

Obama’s pledge never matched up to the actual law. The law epitomizes “Washington knows best” paternalism. Everyone must have the one-size-fits-all health plan designed by “experts.”

Bingo. John Hinderaker at Power Line adds:

So President Obama’s endlessly-repeated promise that if you like the insurance you have, you can keep it, was always a lie. Most people have figured that out by now, and people who are angry about losing their coverage are not going to be mollified by being told that their insurance carriers were “bad apples.”

Remember: Obama, his administration, and the rest of the Democrats who shoved this law down the throats of the American people knew. They ALWAYS knew. Yet they repeatedly misrepresented the facts and lied over and over again (painting the opposition as “racists”, of course) in order to “gain” support of low information voters and a complicit mainstream media, who were always in the tank for him anyway.  Team Obama is now furiously backtracking and trying to spin their way out of it because they’re so used to the media allowing them to dodge and weave out of controversies. Doesn’t sound like DC journalists are letting them off the hook this time.  Good.  The time for intense scrutiny of this duplicitous administration is long, long overdue.