print“President Pinocchio’s Growing Proboscis” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:
… Voluntarily, 14 million Americans had purchased and paid for their now-obsolete, outlawed health-care insurance. Stated differently, these individuals valued what the policy had to offer more than the money it cost them. They liked the product the president has proscribed.
And they don’t like what replaces it. George Schwab of North Carolina was “’perfectly happy” to continue paying Blue Cross Blue Shield a premium of $228 a month to insure himself and his wife.
President Obama wasn’t having any of it. By legislative fiat, he stopped what was a mutually beneficial arrangement between the two consenting parties.
On Oct. 30, Big Brother Obama claimed that Mr. Schwab and millions of happy customers like him were “underinsured.” So Obama ensured that for “underinsuring” themselves, these Americans would lose their insurance.
Mr. Schwab and his ilk are now without insurance.
From the president’s perspective, the 62-year-old man does not know what’s good for him. Fortunately for Mr. Schwab and other clueless clients like him, Big Brother does. To the rescue came Obama. Mr. Schwab had fallen prey to a “bad apple insurer,” grated the president. He is among “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.”
Foolish Mr. Schwab. He was content with a purchase Mr. Obama deemed “substandard.” Luckily for Mr. Schwab and a million other Americans, so far, the president removed their “substandard plan” before it could hurt them.
Better to be uninsured than to have “substandard” insurance.
Also on Oct. 30 did Mr. Obama vow to the Mr. Schwabs of America—roughly 14 million of them—that they would be “getting a better deal.” “Almost all the insurers,” cooed the president, “are encouraging people to join better plans with the same carrier and stronger benefits and stronger protections while others will be able to get better plans with new carriers through the marketplace …”
Desperate, Mr. Schwab went looking for the Promised Plan.
He discovered that Barack Obama’s command-and-control, nationalized “marketplace” would be charging him $948 a month for a plan that met the president’s requirements, one of which was that everybody must “contribute.” Everyone must “take some measure of responsibility,” preached Obama.
A monthly premium hike of more than 400 percent is to be Mr. Schwab’s “contribution” to the un-Affordable Care Act’s collective kitty. …
Read the complete column. “President Pinocchio’s Growing Proboscis” is now on WND.
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UPDATE I: MEGYN KELLY interviews MARC THIESSEN of the AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE FELLOW, who explains why it was essential for Obama to finish off the individual market for health-care insurance: this relatively wealthy cohort must be funneled into his nationalized “markets” and made to fund it.
KELLY: … And tonight, we have dug up an IRS form from 2010 that shows that this administration knew that over 10 million Americans would not keep their plan, could not keep their doctor. And yet the president went out as recently as 2012 and said if you like your plan you could keep it. Meantime there is a regulation — an IRS regulation, it was pushed by HHS, Human Services, that said estimated that tens of millions would going to get dumped.
Marc Thiessen is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. And I mean, this is it. It is one thing to say — he said they were going to get to keep their plans, period. And now this regulation shows that months after ObamaCare was passed, July, it passed in March. July or before, I should say. Before, they knew. They were estimating internally in the administration ten million people are going to lose their insurance.
MARC THIESSEN, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE FELLOW: Yes. You’ve got the smoking gun right there in your hand. Look, they knew. When President Obama looked at the American people in the eye and said if you like your health insurance, you can keep your current plan, period, no matter what, that was a bald-faced lie.
And he intended — in fact, I think that they intended for these people to lose their health insurance. And the reason for that is — as you pointed out — it will be up to 14 million people. Why would they want those people to lose their health insurance? Because they need those people to move into the exchanges to subsidize the poor people.
The individual mandate is the most lucrative part — I’m sorry, the individual market is the most lucrative part of the segment of the health insurance industry because those people don’t use a lot of services and they are generally healthy. And so, those are the people that they need to move into the exchanges in order to subsidize ObamaCare.
So, while President Obama was going out there saying you won’t lose your health insurance, period, all along they were planning for those people to lose their health insurance — 14 million of them and move into the exchanges.
UPDATE II: Pat Buchanan quips in his latest column:
Obama’s assurances of keeping your insurance plan if you like it now enters presidential history alongside George H.W. Bush’s “Read my lips! No new taxes,” Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” and George W. Bush’s tales of yellow cake in Niger and hidden arsenals of WMDs.
Priceless.