Progressive Hack Sally Kohn: Losing Your Health Insurance is a Good Thing!

Yeah.

This whole kerfuffle ignores that insurance plans were changing all the time and premiums were skyrocketing pre-Obamacare. Suddenly, a whole range of bad behavior on the part of insurance companies is blamed on the Affordable Care Act. It’s just like employers trying to shaft their workers by cutting hours and benefits and blaming it on the Affordable Care Act, even though employer mandate provisions don’t take effect for another year.

Trying to blame Obamacare for every problem in the private insurance market is paradoxical: The whole reason for passing the Affordable Care Act was to fix what’s broken with private insurance [no period; sic]

Every word of her article is a lie, including the punctuation. But let me take a 10,000 foot view of this.

Here's the reason the "If you like your insurance, you get to keep your insurance" promise was so important: Because it promised people choice. People only agreed to this boondoggle (actually, they never agreed, but let's say they resisted less) because Obama swore up and down that they would have the choice of retaining their old insurance or switching to the new, supposedly "better," insurance.

See, if you have that choice, then you can switch if the new policy is in fact better. You are thus held harmless -- if you think the new policy is in fact worse, you can simply opt-out by not signing up for the new policy.

This is the whole reason this promise was so important. If the new policy was actually worse in terms of cost, deductible, and so forth, people would still have the option of retaining their old policy.

On the other hand, if you are not allowed this choice, the government can force you to accept worse coverage -- or the same coverage at stratospherically-jacked-up premiums -- and you cannot do anything at all about it, except take your punishment.

Obama knows damn well the new policies are not "better." They cover a few things near and dear to progressive hearts (substance abuse, birth control pills, mental treatment), but these new things are rather cheaply covered, and cannot possibly account for the doubling or trebling of premiums -- nor with the doubling of deductibles that usually comes with Obamacare's doubling or trebling of premiums.

These policies are not in fact "better" in any way, which is why Obama must force people into his high-risk polls to subsidize other people.

The "you will have your choice" promise, made repeatedly, reassured people that they would not simply be forced into high-risk pools and be offered catastrophic coverage and comprehensive coverage prices.

But he was always lying.

Sally Kohn can spin that this is "better" insurance. But if it were better, people would sign up for it willingly. If it were actually "better," Obama would not have had to write the HHS rules to un-grandfather supposedly grandfathered policies and dump people into the high-risk pools, thus forcing them to buy the supposedly "better" insurance.

It's not "better" insurance -- it is what conservatives have been saying for five long years: It is stealing some of someone's private insurance in order to pay for someone else's.

Which is precisely what Obama promised it was not. And, in fact, people have been called "racist" for speaking such "lies" for five years.

If it's "better" insurance, Sally Kohn, why does Obama feel required to break his solemn promise that "if you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance"?

If it was really "better," he could afford to keep this promise. What does he care if people choose worse coverage?

No, the whole point is that he wants to force people into subsidizing others, by terminating their supposedly grandfathered policies and dumping them into the high-risk pools.

Insurance that costs three times as much as previous insurance, and double the deductible, is not "better" for the person paying for it. It may be better for the person being subsidized by those jacked-up rates, but not for the person paying for the policy.

This guarantee -- that people could choose themselves -- provided them with an escape hosta to make sure they could personally enforce Obama's promise that they would be held harmless.

Without that, Obama can punish them with higher premiums, and they have no way out -- which is precisely what he's doing.

And that's why Obama promised people that they could keep their insurance -- so that they wouldn't realize they'd now be paying for the insurance of a couple of strangers.

And that's why he must now reveal that promise to have been a lie all along.

posted by Ace at 03:04 PM

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