It’s a 100 percent lie, according to the White House’s own figures.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
Last Thursday, President Obama purported to undo the “Affordable” Care Act (ACA
)
mandates that he and congressional Democrats quite intentionally
designed to force Americans off their health-insurance
policies . . . notwithstanding the president’s promise, repeated over
and over again since 2009, that Americans would be able to keep their
health-insurance policies. In my weekend column, I argued that Obama’s latest unilateral diktat
is lawless and transparently political. With each passing day, however,
what becomes more breathtaking is the depth of systematic, calculated
lying that went into the extensive — the criminal — Obamacare
fraud.
Let’s quickly recap the lawlessness and cynical politics behind
Thursday’s pathetic press conference. Obama, who poses as a
constitutional-law expert, knows full well that a president has no legal
authority to waive statutory mandates. Even if he had such power,
moreover, he knows that there is no practical possibility of undoing —
within the next few weeks, as the ACA would require — the new
arrangements that insurance companies and state regulators spent the
last three years structuring to comply with Obamacare mandates. In sum,
Obama is well aware that his proposed “fix” is frivolous. His hope is
that the country overwhelmingly consists of dolts who are too uninformed
to realize that this is the case, and who, with a little help from his
media courtiers, can be convinced to blame the insurance companies,
rather than the president, for the fact that millions of Americans are
losing their coverage under his “reform.”
Now, having covered Thursday’s con job, let’s get back to the
overarching Obamacare scheme perpetrated by the president for more than
four years — a fraud that, I
contend,
the Justice Department would not hesitate to prosecute had it been
committed by a private-sector executive. I’ve related the standards for
criminal and civil enforcement that would militate in favor of
prosecution in a case involving the dimension of fraud and breach of
fiduciary duty we find here. In addition, NRO’s Andrew Stiles had a
superb
report
on Friday showing the sundry ways the administration’s dysfunctional
Obamacare website, HealthCare.gov, runs afoul of various
consumer-protection laws. Again, when such infractions are committed by
private businesses, the government punishes them quite severely.
We now discover even more evidence of how brazen Obama’s lies have been.
The president claims he truly believed that people would be able to
keep plans they liked because Obamacare provides for those plans to be
“grandfathered” — exempted from termination. Thus, he insists, he was
acting in good faith when he made the promises that people could keep
those plans, though he concedes the promises “ended up being
inaccurate.”
This is yet another calculated deception, a willful continuation of
the fraudulent scheme. The president well knew that, in implementing the
“grandfathering” provision, his administration wrote regulations so
narrow that tens of millions of existing plans would be eliminated.
Congressional Democrats knew this, too: When Republicans endeavored in
2010 to enact legislation that would have broadened the regulation into a
meaningful safe harbor, Democrats closed ranks and voted down the
proposal – including Democrats such as Senator Mary Landrieu, who now
pretends to be a crusader in the cause of letting Americans keep their
insurance.
Unable to deny that millions of Americans have lost the coverage he
vowed they could keep, Obama and other Democrats are now peddling what
we might call the “5 percent” con job. The president asserts that these
victims, whom he feels so terribly about, nevertheless constitute a
tiny, insignificant minority in the greater scheme of things (“scheme”
is used advisedly). They are limited, he maintains, to consumers in the
individual health-insurance market, as opposed to the vastly greater
number of Americans who get insurance through their employers. According
to Obama, these individual-market consumers whose policies are being
canceled make up only 5 percent of all health-insurance consumers.
Even this 5 percent figure is a deception. As Avik Roy
points out, the individual market actually accounts for
8 percent
of health-insurance consumers. Obama can’t help himself: He even
minimizes his minimizations. So, if Obama were telling the truth in
rationalizing that his broken promises affect only consumers in the
individual-insurance market, we’d still be talking about up to 25
million Americans. While the president shrugs these victims off, 25
million exceeds the number of Americans who do not have health insurance
because of poverty or preexisting conditions (as opposed to those who
could, but choose not to, purchase insurance). Of course, far from
cavalierly shrugging off that smaller number of people, Obama and
Democrats used them to justify nationalizing a sixth of the U.S.
economy.
But that’s not the half of it. Obama’s claim that unwelcome
cancellations are confined to the individual-insurance market is another
brazen lie. In the weekend column, I link to the excellent work of
Powerline’s John Hinderaker, who has
demonstrated that, for over three years, the Obama administration’s internal estimates have shown that most Americans who are covered by “
employer plans” will also lose their coverage under Obamacare. Mind you,
156 million Americans get health coverage through their jobs.
John cites the Federal Register, dated June 17, 2010, beginning at
page 34,552 (Vol. 75, No. 116). It includes a chart that outlines the
Obama administration’s projections. The chart indicates that somewhere
between 39 and 69 percent of employer plans would lose their “grandfather” protection by 2013. In fact, for small-business employers, the high-end estimate is a staggering
80 percent (and even on the low end, it’s just a shade under half — 49 percent).
That is to say: During all these years, while Obama was repeatedly
assuring Americans, “If you like your health-insurance plan, you can
keep your health-insurance plan,” he actually expected as many as
seven out of every ten Americans covered by
employer plans to lose their coverage. For small business, he expected at least one out of every two Americans, or as many as
four out of every five, to lose their coverage.
Avik’s eagle eye also catches that, even as Obama was spinning on
Thursday about how his broken promise affects only the teeny-weeny
individual-insurance market, his administration was
telling a much different story
to state insurance commissioners. In a letter about Obama’s proposed
“fix,” the head of the relevant consumer-information office referred to
“all individuals
and small businesses that received a
cancellation or termination notice with respect to coverage” (emphasis
added). This, Avik observes, “contradicts assertions from the
administration that only people in the individual market — people who
shop for coverage on their own — are affected by the wave of
Obamacare-related cancellations.”
It gets worse. My friends at the American Freedom Law Center (on
whose advisory board I sit) are representing Priests for Life, a group
aggrieved by Obamacare’s denial of religious liberty — specifically, the
ACA’s mandate that believers, despite their faith-based objections,
provide their employees with coverage for the use of abortifacients and
contraceptives. On October 17, the Obama Department of Health and Human
Services, represented by the Obama Justice Department, submitted a brief
to the federal district court in Washington, opposing Priests for
Life’s summary judgment motion. On page 27 of its brief, the Justice
Department makes the following remarkable assertion:
The [ACA’s] grandfathering provision’s incremental transition does
not undermine the government’s interests in a significant way. [Citing,
among other sources, the Federal Register.] Even under the
grandfathering provision, it is projected that more group health plans
will transition to the requirements under the regulations as time goes
on. Defendants have estimated that a majority of group health plans will
have lost their grandfather status by the end of 2013.
HHS and the Justice Department cite the same section of the Federal
Register referred to by John Hinderaker, as well as an annual survey on “
Employer Health Benefits” compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2012.
So, while the president has been telling us that, under the vaunted
grandfathering provision, all Americans who like their health-insurance
plans will be able to keep them, “period,” his administration has been
representing in federal court that most health plans would lose their
“grandfather status” by the end of this year. Not just the “5 percent”
of individual-market consumers, but close to all consumers — including
well over 100 million American workers who get coverage through their
jobs — have been expected by the president swiftly to “transition to the
requirements under the [Obamacare] regulations.” That is, their
health-insurance plans would be eliminated. They would be forced into
Obamacare-compliant plans, with all the prohibitive price hikes and
coercive mandates that “transition” portends.
Obamacare is a massive fraudulent scheme. A criminal investigation
should be opened. Obviously, the Obama Justice Department will not do
that, but the House of Representatives should commence hearings into the
offenses that have been committed in the president’s deception of the
American people.
