By Michael Arata
If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away, no matter what." -- President Barack Obama, remarks to the American Medical Association, June 15, 2009.
"[The community organizer] does not have a fixed truth -- truth to him is relative and changing." -- Saul Alinsky, in "Rules for Radicals," dedicated by its author to Lucifer.
In June 2010, three months after Barack Obama signed the "Affordable Care Act" into law, executive-branch personnel published rules mandating new health-insurance components, while dictating simultaneously that any change in existing plans would disallow ACA-stipulated "grandfathering" of those plans.
The same Federal Register pages, subscribed by Health and Humas Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius along with Labor and Treasury department officials, estimated that up to 69 percent of all employer-sponsored health plans -- and 40 to 67 percent of individual policies -- would soon lose grandfathered status, requiring cancellation.
But Sebelius then blogged falsely that "under the Affordable Care Act, if you like your doctor and plan, you can keep them."
Alert Republican senators tried to block the new Catch-22 rules, predicting that millions of forced policy cancellations would otherwise belie Obama's promises -- by then, already reiterated at least 27 times.
Majority Democrats suppressed the Republican resolution.
Obama then continued his health-plan and doctor-retention pledge during his 2012 re-election campaign, and on up to Sept. 26, 2013, when he said, "If you already have health care, you don't have to do anything."
Such assertions finally became too much an "emperor's new clothes" hoax even for some in the liberal press, where Obama cover-ups and double standards have generally been de rigueur.
On Oct. 28, NBC News reported that the Obama administration had known since 2010 that millions of Americans would experience health-policy cancellations under Obamacare.
Alarmed, Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett tweeted, "FACT: Nothing in #Obamacare forces people out of their health plans. No change is required unless insurance companies change existing plans."
The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler noted the bait and switch, observing that Jarrett was "describing rules written by the president's aides that were designed to make it difficult for plans to remain grandfathered for very long."
Yet before and after ACA passage, "the president's statements were sweeping and unequivocal," Kessler recalled. He awarded Obama "Four Pinocchios."
On Nov. 4, Obama himself told his Organizing for Action fans that "what we said was you can keep (a health plan you like) if it hasn't changed since the law passed."
Politifact rated Obama's new claim a "Pants on Fire" lie. National Journal's Ron Fournier called it "lying about lies."
In legal terms, Obama's years-long, systematic deceptions amounted to fraudulent inducement. And the White House is reportedly warning insurance companies to keep quiet about it.
In a Nov. 7 interview on NBC, Obama finally offered a nuanced apology to those receiving policy cancellations: "I am sorry that they, uh, you know" (what's the spin? -- oh, I remember), "are finding themselves in this situation, based on assurances they got from me."
Translation: it's time for false regrets that millions of people naively believed serial lies broadcast relentlessly by the narcissist/prevaricator in chief and his collaborators, to enable a health-care takeover by government and to facilitate Obama's re-election.
And after all, in maneuvering to impose "single-payer" medicine (Obama's announced strategic objective), truth is just -- uh, you know -- an expendable abstraction.
Meanwhile, as I write this, the White House health-care Web page is still lying: "If you like your plan you can keep it and you don't have to change a thing due to the health care law."
Michael Arata is a Danville resident.
http://www.contracostatimes.com/opinion/ci_24526111/lies-about-health-care-plan-just-keepcoming-from
