Recently a reader wrote to your pages outraged about lies our president told when assuring consumers who liked their current health insurance policies that they would be able to keep them under the Affordable Care Act.
The writer of the letter does not state that his insurance policy was canceled. But since he exercised very little constraint in his condemnation of Obama, one can safely assume that if this had been the case, it would have been central to his theme. As for me, since I live far below the poverty line, I have not had the benefit of health insurance going back for more than a decade before the ACA became law, but now I do.
The Obama administration canceled no one’s policy. It is not the government doing this, it is the insurance companies. Your reader calls the ACA socialism, but unfortunately this is not the case. If our health care system were socialized, no one’s policy would have been canceled. However, since the private sector is in charge of issuing the policies, the government cannot compel them to stop the cancelations.
The policies being canceled fall below minimum standards. Those policies could have been improved by the insurance companies to include the necessary coverage, but since these policies covered nothing for very little money, the insurance companies could not upgrade them without increasing costs. They were not worth the paper they were printed on.
Cancelation was a purely capitalistic decision made by private institutions. Therefore, claiming that the ACA is socialism, as your reader does in his letter, is a lie, but I will be kind and say only that he was mistaken.
Your reader states that Obama lied to 300 million Americans, but why stop the hyperbole there? Why not include the billions of other people in the world, or perhaps include all the future millions of American citizens not yet born? However, since only 6 percent of the population owns individual health insurance policies, and only half of those are in jeopardy, perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that Obama lied to 3 percent of the population. So the statement in his letter that said he lied to 300 million citizens was, I won’t say a lie, but inaccurate. And if our assumption that his policy was not canceled, then he wasn’t lied to at all.
What prompted me to write though was not the prevarication contained within the letter. It is my amazement that anyone should expect truth from a president. Your reader claims that repealing the ACA is a matter of life and death, another obvious lie that I will only call an over-exaggeration.
But the previous president lied about the weapons of mass destruction, and more American lives were lost as a result of that lie than died on 9-11. The president before him lied about having sex with an intern. Before that we had the first President Bush, who lied about not raising taxes, and before him Reagan, who lied about Iran-Contra, and before him we had the biggest liar of them all, Richard Milhous Nixon. Based on recent history, one might even say that lying is presidential.
Our own State Supreme Court has ruled that it is perfectly acceptable for politicians to lie to their hearts content. When was the last time any of us ever saw an honest political ad?
But since 97 percent of the population won’t have their policies canceled, and since I now have health insurance when previously I had none, as lies go, I can live with this one.
– Marshall Dunlap
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