During the public debate over health care in 2009 and 2010, no matter how tightly you may have shut your door, there was one piece of information it was impossible to avoid: the president's promise that if you liked your doctor and your health care plan you would be able to keep it. So it was a surprise to many people to get a letter like the one Independence Blue Cross sent its customers weeks ago. It said that as a result of the Affordable Care Act, "your current plan will be discontinued effective January 1, 2014, and you will need to select a new plan by the end of December to avoid any interruption in coverage."
That wasn't what the president promised. But wait, the president can explain. It's not what we think. People won’t have the same insurance—they will have better insurance, administration officials assure. That's not the way some of the people receiving these letters see it. The president's original promise was so ironclad and repeated so often that any explanation now sounds like dissembling.
When healthcare.gov launched with the fanfare and success of a North Korean missile, the president insisted that Obamacare was more than a website. The website might be a mess, but the underlying product was sound. Now, it's Republicans who are using this exact phrase. Like the president, GOP leaders want people to focus on the larger law. You can fix a website, they say, but you can't improve the law.
What started as a website debacle is growing into a relitigation of the underlying operation. The Affordable Care Act passed with cracks and inconsistencies that are now re-emerging in the context of the website's bad launch. In some cases that simply gives Republicans new lines of attack. In others, like this argument over keeping your old health care, the failure of the site is weakening the administration's ability to engage in those old debates.
The matter at issue here only affects the 5 percent of the population that buys health care in the individual market, compared to the 80 percent who get health care through their companies. The president's press secretary, Jay Carney, pointed this out several times in his daily briefing Tuesday to put the controversy in perspective. “You would think in some of the coverage over the last several days we were talking about 75 percent,” he said. Fair enough, but the president's claim about keeping coverage was always about more than a sliver of people signing up for Obamacare which is why it has the ability to resonate beyond the audience directly affected by it.
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Dickerson writes for the liberal
Slate. He is also astute enough to recognize the problem caused by Obama's misleading promise. You can commit fraud by failing to disclose a material fact that would have changed someones decision. Even if you buy Obama's attempt to slip off of his outright lie, by suggesting a different meaning, he can't slip off his failure to disclose a material fact.
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