White House Knew Millions Could Not Keep Health Plans

by JASmius

Well, tell us something we didn't know, Scooter.

Just to go through the motions, here's the White House's purportedly astonished reaction to this totally, completely, stunningly unanticipatedly tragic turn of events:

White House spokesman Jay Carney admitted Monday some Americans won't be able to hold onto their current healthcare plans under Obamacare — despite the president's 2009 emphatic promise "if you like your healthcare plan, you'll be able to keep your healthcare plan. Period."

"So it's true there are existing healthcare plans on the individual market that do not meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act," Carney said in response to a question about an earlier remark by David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama during his first term, the Weekly Standard reported.

 And here is what they knew all along and were transparently BSing about from day one - and note the source:

NBC News, citing unnamed sources, reported that the administration knew that some 50% — or as many as 80% — of those with individual insurance policies could expect to be canceled largely because their policies don't meet Obamacare's minimum standards of coverage. NBC's experts say the costs of new policies will skyrocket.

Of course they knew.  How could they not know that by outlawing most or all forms of individual health insurance coverage below the "comprehensive" level, they would cause premium levels to explode?  It's like outlawing all cars below Lamborghini-class, then telling all automobile shoppers that they can keep their Ford Escorts or buy that 'vette they've always wanted at Yugo prices.  For all the fun we wingnuts have about O's incompetence, they're not that vapid.  It's the sixty-two million morons that elected and re-elected him that merit that description.

Well guess what, numbnuts - surprise!:

"Remember: The president didn’t say if you like your plan and we approve it you can keep it," Stewart wrote, the Post reported. "He promised that if you like your plan, you can keep it, period— “no matter what.”

Yet the NBC report said the government knew that wasn't true, saying that buried in regulations from the July 2010 law was an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40% to 67%” of customers will not be able to keep their policy.

And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40% to 67% range.”

“This says that when they made the promise, they knew half the people in this market outright couldn’t keep what they had and then they wrote the rules so that others couldn’t make it either,” Robert Laszewski of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, told NBC.

He estimated 80% of those in the individual market will not be able to keep their current policies and will have to buy insurance that meets requirements of the new law, which generally requires a richer package of benefits than most policies today.

Remember what I've been saying about pre-rollout opposition to ObamaCare being a mile wide and an inch deep.  Heretofore, the trauma of this unfolding assault - there really is no other word for it - was an abstraction, some amorphous potentiality floating around out there somewhere.  Now it's become brutally real.  And the $17 trillion question is now what will win the race that has been set before us: public anger and outrage propelling an all-out drive to repeal this nightmare before it can go any further, or the Left's obsessed zealotry to bulldoze the country into full-blown, all-out single-payer socialized medicine.

This is why I maintain that Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, et al pulled the confrontation trigger too soon.  The only ones who can lead this last ditch repeal effort are the Republicans - the same Republicans whose "brand" was tanked by the premature shutdown gambit.  Will the same American public that has this subterranean view of the GOP be so desperate that they will support them anyway in what amounts to a peaceful uprising against a Regime that knew and knows exactly what it is doing?

If they want their health care back, they have no other choice.


UPDATE: Well, this is interesting - and, of course, note the source:

Under pressure from the White House, NBC threw its reporter [Lisa Meyers] under the bus and censored the news that Obama wrote regulations to disqualify and terminate health insurance policies.

They later re-inserted the censored material. But what would compel them to delete true information in the first place?

Fears for Barack Obama's political position, of course.

Ace has a slightly different take on what makes this so incendiary a revelation - in essence, it matters less what the president knew and when he knew it than that he has it within his legitimate, constitutional powers to fix it and refuses to do so:

The story is not that "Obama knew" that policies would be terminated. That's damning.

But what is hugely damning and very important going forward is not that Obama knew, but that Obama made this happen, and could unmake it with a phone call, but chooses not to.

The White House's pushback on this point demonstrates that they understand how important this part of Lisa Meyers' report is....

This is not just about having knowledge that events beyond Obama's control would unfold - this is about events directly at his control. Regulation-writers are executive employees, and as such, answer to the president and not Congress.

This means Obama has the actual power -- not the puffed up, falsely asserted unconstitutional power, but the genuine legal power -- to call this agency and tell them, "We sold this bill as permitting people to keep their insurance; please re-write the regulations in a way that will honor this promise."...

Obama has it within his power to call up the HHS reg-writers and instruct them to honor the promise he made time and again for two years. And he doesn't want people to know this, because he is determined to break that promise....

[E]ven at this late date, he could still choose to honor his promise.

But he won't, because he can't -- he always intended to take people's insurance away from them. Always. And he's not going to undo, short of a veto-proof act of Congress. [last emphasis mine]

There's your cue, Senator Cruz.  Release the hounds.


ANOTHER UPDATE:

All of the above, more or less, in video:





STILL ANOTHER UPDATE:  CBS joins the party as well.  Perhaps some media embargos aren't impregnable after all.