Biden Repeats Obama Health Care Lie: 'You Can Keep Your Private Insurance'
“If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan.”
Perhaps then-President Barack Obama and his top administration officials believed they were telling the truth when they uttered that line or something close to it more than three dozen times in referring to health insurance changes under the Affordable Care Act, colloquially known as Obamacare, according to PolitiFact.
Put simply, they were not.
“The promise was impossible to keep,” PolitiFact reported in December 2013 as the fact-checking outlet declared that line it’s “Lie of the Year.”
“Boiling down the complicated health care law to a soundbite proved treacherous, even for its promoter-in-chief,” the fact-checker added.
“Obama’s ideas on health care were first offered as general outlines then grew into specific legislation over the course of his presidency. Yet Obama never adjusted his rhetoric to give people a more accurate sense of the law’s real-world repercussions, even as fact-checkers flagged his statements as exaggerated at best.
“Instead, he fought back against inaccurate attacks with his own oversimplifications, which he repeated even as it became clear his promise was too sweeping.”
Years later, Obama’s former vice president, Joe Biden, now the Democratic presidential nominee, is repeating that lie.
“Look, Donald Trump thinks healthcare is a privilege; I think it’s a right people should have. If we all get out and vote, we’ll not only restore Obamacare, but we’ll strengthen and build on it,” Biden said Friday during a campaign rally in Milwaukee.
“So you can keep your private insurance, or you could choose a Medicare-like option that will add to Obamacare.”
I suppose it’s a good thing that Biden isn’t openly campaigning on abolishing private health insurance — as many on the left want to do — something that would be devastating for millions of Americans, particularly amid the current pandemic.
Here’s the problem: Biden is just not all that believable, especially considering the former vice president seems to think that no one with private health insurance actually lost coverage under Obamacare.
Remember, this is the same guy who claimed during the final presidential debate, according to Fox News: “Not one single person with private insurance would lose their insurance under my plan, nor did they under Obamacare.”
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“They did not lose their insurance unless they chose they wanted to go to something else.”
Well, not quite, Joe, and PolitiFact was there to call him out for the misleading comments.
“It’s a variation of a claim that earned President Barack Obama our Lie of the Year in 2013,” the outlet reported.
“The Affordable Care Act tried to allow existing health plans to continue under a complicated process called ‘grandfathering,’ but if the plans deviated even a little, they would lose their grandfathered status. And if that happened, insurers canceled plans that didn’t meet the new standards.
“No one determined with any certainty how many people got cancellation notices, but analysts estimated that about 4 million or more had their plans canceled.”
The Obama-Biden administration wasn’t able to keep its promises on health care when they were in power.
Why should we believe Biden this time around when he claims people would be able to “keep [their] private insurance” under his new health care plan?
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
