Obama's Obamacare Lies Were Chronicled From the Beginning

By David Limbaugh

Friday, November 08, 2013

Don't you believe that President Obama's lies that people could keep their health insurance plans and doctors were his only lies about Obamacare or that these and the other lies were not demonstrably false when he uttered them.

In my book "Crimes Against Liberty," I chronicled Obama's multitudinous lies about Obamacare and many other subjects, from earmarks to tax increases. Please allow me to revisit some of my reporting on the Obamacare lies in light of the recent furor over Obama's dissembling concerning health care.

Let's start with the particularly galling declaration Obama made after Congress' partisan passage of Obamacare on March 21, 2010: "We proved that this government -- a government of the people and by the people -- still works for the people. ... Tonight's vote ... is a victory for the American people."

Never mind that the American public was manifestly against passage of the bill, as shown in poll after poll and further demonstrated by Obama's inability to get the bill passed -- despite overwhelming Democratic majorities in both chambers -- without, in my words in the book, "legislative trickery, executive deception, political bribes, arm-twisting, and a meaningless executive order to supposedly negate the bill's abortion funding provisions."

Sen. Lamar Alexander, no raging conservative, then observed that Obama's behavior on Obamacare was "the most brazen act of political arrogance since Watergate ... in terms of thumbing your nose at the American people and saying, 'We know you don't want it, but we're going to give it to you anyway.'"

Indeed, this is essentially what Obama's defenders are saying now with respect to Obama's "you can keep your plan" lie: "Obama lied to the American people because a lie is sometimes necessary for the greater good."

During the Democratic presidential primary campaign, Obama repeatedly promised that he would televise the health care debates on C-SPAN. When he was criticized for shamelessly reneging, he reacted similarly to how he is today, by twisting his own words. Even PolitiFact called him out on this "broken" promise.

Many of us pointed out at the time that Obama was lying when he said we could keep our plans and doctors. In the book, I wrote: "Obama said Obamacare 'would preserve the right of Americans who have insurance to keep their doctor and their plan.' But he knew his plan had no such guarantee, and he also knew the plan would likely crowd out private insurers. The chief actuary of the Medicare program estimates 14 million people will lose their employer coverage under Obamacare, even though many will want to keep it."

I continued, "Investor's Business Daily reported that internal White House documents show Obamacare may result in 51 percent of employers (and 66 percent of small business employers) relinquishing their current health care coverage by 2013." Well, IBD may have estimated the date wrong, but these aren't new revelations we're witnessing, folks.

I wrote that Obama told a joint session of Congress on health care Sept. 9, 2009, "Under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions." That very declaration, along with a bogus executive order, I noted, directly led to the passage of the bill by securing Democrat Bart Stupak's vote. The law obviously allowed federal funding for abortion; otherwise, Obama wouldn't have needed to issue the executive order supposedly countermanding it. But abortion, in some cases, was federally funded anyway.

The book also documented the double counting and sleights of hand Obama employed to misrepresent the bill as budget-neutral to the Congressional Budget Office. "'The most amazing bit of unrealistic accounting,' says (former CBO Director Douglas) Holtz-Eakin, is the projected savings of $463 billion from Medicare spending, which will be used to finance insurance subsidies. But Medicare has no extra funds at all to donate to the cause: it 'is already bleeding red ink.'" Holtz-Eakin estimated that these unaccounted items would "generate additional deficits of $562 billion in the first 10 years." Clearly, the administration knew at the time it was lying. These weren't just innocuous miscalculations.

Obama was also lying when he said Obamacare would reduce premiums by $2,500 for an average family of four. In the book, I quoted a CEO of one of the biggest health care companies, who said Obamacare would obviously make premiums go up. I also reported that economic experts inside the Health and Human Services Department confessed that contrary to Obama's claim, Obamacare would increase health care costs.

I unpacked Obama's egregious lies concerning the uninsured that served as the fraudulent impetus for this entire reform mania, and I covered the remainder of Obama's Obamacare lies concerning access to care, choice, quality of care, a single-payer plan and more.

The point of all this is not to claim any prescience on my part but to demonstrate that this information was available at the time for all to see. But the liberal media, Democrats and many other Obama enablers nonetheless deliberately assisted Obama in misleading the public into passing a bill that could very well lead to the destruction of the greatest health care system in history.