New York Times: Redistribution of Wealth Is Central to Obamacare, And That Was "Hiding in Plain Sight" All Along

Via Hot Air, the press continues discovering how informative reading the law and consulting with impartial experts can be.

Don’t Dare Call the Health Law ‘Redistribution'

...

“Redistribution is a loaded word that conjures up all sorts of unfairness in people’s minds,” said William M. Daley, who was Mr. Obama’s chief of staff at the time. Republicans wield it “as a hammer” against Democrats, he said, adding, “It’s a word that, in the political world, you just don’t use.”

These days the word is particularly toxic at the White House, where it has been hidden away to make the Affordable Care Act more palatable to the public and less a target for Republicans, who have long accused Democrats of seeking “socialized medicine.” But the redistribution of wealth has always been a central feature of the law and lies at the heart of the insurance market disruptions driving political attacks this fall.

“Americans want a fair and fixed insurance market,” said Jonathan Gruber, a health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who advised Mr. Obama’s team as it designed the law. “You cannot have that without some redistribution away from a small number of people.”

A small number of kulaks, he means.

Don't worry about them. They're Unpeople.

The Times turns to the process of passing Obamacare.

...

But throughout the process, they knew that some level of redistributing wealth — creating losers as well as winners — was inescapable.

They were nonetheless acutely aware of how explosive the word could be. When Mr. Obama ran for president in 2008, Republicans tried to wound him by accusing him of waging “class warfare” to achieve wealth redistribution. That fall, the Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, derided Mr. Obama as the “redistributor in chief” as he seized on Mr. Obama’s comments to an Ohio man later known as “Joe the Plumber” that he wanted to “spread the wealth around.”

Who they "vetted" and awful lot. And then spent a lot of energy claiming that Obama didn't mean what he said when he said what he meant.

And now the press says, "Sorry, brah. M' bad."

Mr. Obama survived that episode and other instances when Republicans deployed old recordings of him using the word “redistribution” as evidence that he was a closet socialist. But Mr. Obama had learned a lesson.

The Times does not say this, but that lesson was "lie about everything."

The article discusses the acknowledged redistribution in Obamacare, such as targeting high income earners for additional taxes to finance the scheme. And then:

...

And yet for those nervous about potential changes, the president promised stability. “If you like your current insurance, you will keep your current insurance,” Mr. Obama said the day he signed the legislation in March 2010, a promise he made repeatedly as the Oct. 1 opening day of the online health insurance marketplaces approached.

Hiding in plain sight behind that pledge — visible to health policy experts but not the general public — was the redistribution required to extend health coverage to those who had been either locked out or priced out of the market.

Now some of that redistribution has come clearly into view.

The press, again, is attempting to conjure a Narrative in which they are not to be deemed either ignorant and incompetent, or else dishonest and complicit in foisting an enormously consequential lie upon the public.

They acknowledge that this was all known by "health policy experts," and yet nowhere here is a satisfactory answer to why the New York Times' own health policy experts did not disclose the redistribution at the heart of Obamacare. Their only quote from a media writer warning the public of this is from a National Review writer, writing back in May 2013.

Did they have no citations to the alleged "Paper of Record" explaining this? Apparently not.

Why not?

As with Obama himself, there are only two possible explanations:

1, the press is ignorant and incompetent and simply not up to the job of doing anything more difficult than straight stenography. And what does this say about their alleged status as the cognitive elite?

or,

2, the press is institutionally, conspiratorially dishonest, and chose not only to not report this for four long years, but even more, chose to actively join in a lie. Because they are fundamentally political actors, and they behave as if they are an extension of Obama's communications shop, pushing false Narratives and pushing back against honest, accurate criticism.

And what does that say about their status as the nation's fact-finders?

At some point, we will get them to confront this, and give us a straight answer as to why they lied to the country, more frequently than Obama himself , about Obama and his pet redistributive Trojan Horse.

posted by Ace at 01:08 PM

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