Fascist NYT editorial board: #ObamaMisspoke on #Obamacare – but your old plan sucked anyway

Failure to communicate
”What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” – Captain, Florida Road Prison 36, from the movie ‘Cool Hand Luke’

(Monday AM Update: The thread title has been changed to something even more fitting of what the NYT editorial board wrote. :) Β –ST )

Unsurprisingly, the editorial page at the New York Times has lined up with other far left fascists when it comes to who makes decisions on the type of healthcare insurance plan you can have (via Memeorandum). In an editorial titled “Insurance Policies Not Worth Keeping”, the board lectures (bolded emphasis added by me):

Congressional Republicans haveΒ stoked consumer fears and confusionΒ with charges that the health care reform law is causing insurers to cancel existing policies and will force many people to pay substantially higher premiums next year for coverage they don’t want. That, they say, violates President Obama’s pledge that if you like the insurance you have, you can keep it.

Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that. By law, insurers cannot continue to sell policies that don’t provide the minimum benefits and consumer protections required as of next year. So they’ve sent cancellation notices to hundreds of thousands of people who hold these substandard policies. (At issue here are not the 149 million people covered by employer plans, but the 10 million to 12 million people who buy policies directly on the individual market.)

But insurers are not allowed to abandon enrollees. They must offer consumers options that do comply with the law, and they are scrambling to retain as many of their customers as possible with new policies that are almost certain to be more comprehensive than their old ones.

Indeed, in all the furor, people forget how terrible many of the soon-to-be-abandoned policies were. Some had deductibles as high as $10,000 or $25,000 and required large co-pays after that, and some didn’t cover hospital care.

This overblown controversy has also obscured the crux of what health care reform is trying to do, which is to guarantee that everyone can buy insurance without being turned away or charged exorbitant rates for pre-existing conditions and that everyone can receive benefits that really protect them against financial or medical disaster, not illusory benefits that prove inadequate when a crisis strikes.

Got that, rubes? Β It’s Republicans who have “stoked confusion” over a law that the President merely “misspoke” about when he told the American people they wouldn’t – couldn’t – be kicked off their existing plans once Obamacare fully took effect. To the slobbering lapdogs at the NYT editorial board who have rolled over for Obama from day one, this can be sweetly and conveniently spun as “misspeaking”, but to the millions of citizens of this country receiving letters in the mail that their coverage has been cancelled, alerting them that they’ll need to pony up a lot more cash (that they don’t have) in order to afford something comparable for them and/or for their families, some who are right in the middle of a healthcare issue who are now extremely concerned that they may not be able to keep their primary care physician – another “misspeak” by Obama – Β this is called exactly what it is: A BALD-FACED LIE.

But worry not, dolts, this is for your own good- and for the good of ALL OF MANKIND:

Starting next year, all plans sold in this country will be required to provide 10 essential benefits, including some, like mental health and substance abuse treatment and maternity and newborn care, that are not now part of many policies. And premiums may well rise, in part because insurance companies must accept all applicants, not just the healthy.

Premiums are apt to come down for older patients and sicker patients with chronic illnesses. Premiums will likely go up for younger, healthier patients. Even so, analysts at the Kaiser Family Foundation believe that most people will actually pay less next year, because those with modest incomes will qualify for federal subsidies and many poor, uninsured people will be eligible for Medicaid.

As I wrote Friday in response to TPM’s absurd piece essentially stating the same thing:

Got it? Even if that 3% number [of people ‘actually’ impacted] Β is correct (and I’d bet $100 it’s not), those people don’t matter, are insignificant in the scheme of things. After all, sacrifices have to be made for the β€œcommon good”, right? Β Just like those people who have lost jobs, or have seen their hours reduced, their full time status reduced to part time, and/or pay cut as a result of companies having to make cost adjustments due to the regulations under Obamacare. Β They don’t count. As to the rest, well, there will be a  ”net benefit” to Obamacare, you see, because even though they are losing their current planΒ thanks to Democrats who voted against a GOP resolution in 2010Β that would have prevented that from happening, they’ll have β€œbetter” options under a β€œnew” plan … except the dum dums at TPM and other liberal outlets parroting this tripe don’t get that for many, comparable plans are too expensive for them and they will Β NOT qualify for a subsidy.

… and nor would they qualify for Medicaid. But again, these people don’t matter, right?

Surprisingly enough, though the reliably left wing parrots at the NYT predictably take Obama’s side on this issue, the equally and usually reliable Obama supporters and proponents of Obamacare at the Charlotte Observer do not. Β Observer associate editor Peter St. Onge wrote at the paper yesterday:

It’s becoming harder to believe [a lie] didn’t happen with this president and his health care law. We all know the quote by now. In 2009, as the Affordable Care Act was being written, Obama told the American Medical Association: β€œIf you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period.” A year later, he reiterated: β€œIf you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you.”

But that wasn’t true. And he knew it. So did a handful of Republicans and journalists who said then that the president couldn’t possibly keep his promise. The Affordable Care Act did allow for some insurance plans to be grandfathered, but the law also required that medical coverage be more robust than the plans many people held. Cancellations were inevitable. Millions of them.

But Obama didn’t equivocate. He didn’t say, β€œWell, I’m not talking aboutΒ allΒ Americans…”

β€œPeriod,” he said.

Now the inevitable has arrived. Americans with individual insurance policies are getting cancellations in the mail. The media are widely reporting what too few did four years ago. Republicans are pouncing with Joe Wilson-like fury.

And now, the president and his supporters are trying to deflect the hard truth with soft logic:

β€œThose Americans had substandard plans…”

Doesn’t matter.

β€œMost will be able to get subsidies for their new, improved plans…”

Also doesn’t matter.

β€œThe cancellations affect only a small number of people…”

Maybe so (or maybe not, according to some estimates). But that doesn’t absolve the deception.

[…]

Obama, not surprisingly, doubled down last week, blaming the media for β€œmisleading” people by not reporting on the better deal many Americans are getting. Did you expect, β€œSorry about that, but I had to fib”?

That’s the calculation the president faced four years ago when deciding what we should know. Should he jeopardize a worthy law – which it is, by the way – by acknowledging its shortcomings up front? Or should he risk a political hit after Obamacare is the law of the land?

But in choosing the latter, he forgot a more basic truth: It should have been our decision, not his.

Welcome to the club, Charlotte Observer. Β  This doesn’t absolve you from your years of covering for Dear Leader on Obamacare, your years of accusing Republicans and conservatives of “racism” and opposing the President for the sake of opposing him, but we’ll take your veiled mea culpa here – and remind you of it often.

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