To pass health plan, Obama and Dems kept mum about its downsides

The journalist Jonathan Cohn, an ardent supporter of Obamacare, recently wrote in The New Republic that problems with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act should be "an opportunity to have a serious conversation about the law's tradeoffs — the one that should have happened a while ago."

Cohn is right that there was no serious conversation about those tradeoffs back when Congress was considering the law's passage in 2009 and 2010. But why was that? It was because President Obama and his Democratic allies could not speak seriously — and honestly — about those tradeoffs and still pass their bill.

So instead, Obama assured Americans they could keep health care policies they liked. And it wasn't just Obama. "One of our core principles is that if you like the health care you have, you can keep it," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in August 2009. "If you like what you have, you can keep it," said then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in October of the same year.

Many, many Democrats promised the same thing. They had to. If they had declared openly that millions of Americans would lose their current coverage and face higher premiums and deductibles — if Obama and Democratic leaders had said that, they would not have been able to maintain party unity in support of the bill, and the Affordable Care Act would never have passed Congress.

It would not have mattered that Republicans opposed the bill unanimously. A frank public discussion of Obamacare would have divided Democratic support, with the result being no new law at all.

But now, as the reality of Obamacare begins to present itself in the lives of millions of Americans, the president and his party can no longer avoid an honest look at the law they passed. And one part of that honesty will be examining what they said when they passed Obamacare. There will likely be a lot of accountability in coming months.

CBS News’ Obamacare ‘Victim’ Now Calls Losing Health Plan a ‘Blessing in Disguise’

When Dianne Barrette appeared on CBS This Morning last week, she instantly became the poster child for all of those Americans whose insurance companies are terminating their plans due to the higher standards dictated by the Affordable Care Act. Now, in an interview with The New Republic, the 56-year-old Florida resident admits that losing her existing health insurance plan my not be so terrible after all.

Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher debunked much of CBS News’ reporting in a column that called the segment “misleading” and revealed the details of Barrette’s bare bones insurance plan. “The plan that Barrette paid $54 a month for is barely health insurance at all,” Christopher wrote. ‘It’s part of a subset of insurance that Consumer Reports calls “junk health insurance” (and which even the company that sells it recommends that customers not rely solely upon) and it pays only $50 towards most of the services it covers.”

The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn, who cites Christopher’s article as an initial source in his piece, takes this approach one step further by extensively outlining the variety of plans likely available for Barrette under Obamacare. He concludes that given her income, the cheapest plan available for Barrette after federal subsidies are subtracted would cost around $100 per month, or just $50 more than she was paying before and would protect her from bankruptcy, something her old plan did not do. For $150 per month, her coverage would be significantly more comprehensive.

When Cohn explained these options to Barrette, she responded: “I would jump at it. With my age, things can happen. I don’t want to have bills that could make me bankrupt. I don’t want to lose my house.” Whereas on CBS Barrette explained how “happy” she was with her current insurance and asked “Why do I have to be forced into something else?” after learning more about her new options she’s striking a different tone. “Maybe, it’s a blessing in disguise,” she told Cohn.

Via: Mediaite.com

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