There’s a reason President Obama tries so hard to convince
Americans not to watch Fox News. He keeps shamelessly lying about
easily verifiable facts. Evidently he figures that left-leaning
media outlets won’t call him on it, so if he can only convince
people not to watch FOX, he’ll be OK. Unfortunately for the
president, the American people simply have to look around them to
see that he isn’t being honest with them.
Campaigning in Des Moines, Iowa, yesterday, the President
repeated his biggest health care reform whopper: You can keep your
current health insurance. Here is what he said:
“There’s nothing in the bill that says you have to change
the health insurance you’ve got right now. If you were already
getting health insurance on your job, then that doesn’t
change.”
Yet hours before he uttered that line, the Boston
Globe
reported that Harvard Pilgrim Health Care
was canceling its Medicare Advantage coverage specifically because
of new regulations imposed by Obama’s health care law.
The decision “was prompted by a freeze in federal
reimbursements and a new requirement that insurers offering the
kind of product sold by Harvard Pilgrim — a Medicare Advantage
private fee for service plan — form a contracted network of
doctors who agree to participate for a negotiated amount of money.
Under current rules, patients can seek care from any doctor,” the
Globe reported.
Note: even if Harvard Pilgrim had kept its Medicare
Advantage plan, the law would have required it to offer the service
through doctors who agree “to participate for a negotiated amount
of money.” That means that, contrary to Obama’s claim that you can
keep your current doctor as well as your current insurance, the law
requires Medicare Advantage providers to create HMO-style physician
networks, in which your doctor might or might not agree to
participate.
For New Englanders, Harvard Pilgrim’s decision is pretty
big news. That company’s Medicare Advantage plan covered 22,000
people. Every one of them will have to switch insurers, and
possibly doctors, because of Obamacare. For everyone else, it is a
warning of things to come.
Obama’s claim began to unravel last year, and when
reporters (including some in the mainstream media) began to expose
it as untrue, he revised it. In a June 23, 2009 press conference,
he offered this clarification in response to a question from Jake
Tapper of ABC News:
“When I say if you have your plan and you like it,
or you have a doctor and you like your doctor, that you don’t have
to change plans, what I’m saying is the government is not going to
make you change plans under health reform.”
That is deliberately misleading. As Politifact.com
noted in an August, 2009 post that rated
Obama’s claim half-true, “It’s not realistic for Obama to make
blanket statements that ‘you’ will be able to ‘keep your health
care plan.’ It seems like rhetoric intended to soothe people that
health care reform will not be overly disruptive. But one of the
points of reform is to change the way health care works right
now.”
Exactly. An honest claim would be that the changes imposed
by this new law will result in many Americans losing either their
coverage as it exists now or their doctor — or both.
Politifact and others have rated as technically true
Obama’s claim that “the government is not going to make you change
plans under health reform.” But that is not true, either. The law
mandates that health insurers change the coverage they offer.
Insurers have to offer coverage to people with pre-existing
conditions and to policyholders’ children up to age 26. So
technically, the law did change your health care plan.
As a direct result of those and other mandates, insurers
will then implement further changes. For example, on Monday before
last (more than a week before Obama again claimed that the law
won’t make you change your coverage), reports broke that several
major insurers planned to stop offering new child-only coverage
because of the health care law
“Some of the country’s most prominent health insurance
companies have decided to stop offering new child-only plans,
rather than comply with rules in the new health-care law that will
require such plans to start accepting children with preexisting
medical conditions after Sept. 23,” the Washington
Post
reported on September 20.
The law is only just beginning to take effect, and already
insurers are dropping coverage for tens of thousands of Americans
because of its burdensome mandates. There will be a lot more of
this as additional Obamacare regulations become active. And yet the
president still claims that the law won’t make you change your
coverage or your doctor. Is it any wonder he doesn’t want Americans
to get their information from news outlets that will check his
claims?
