Add two popular fact-checking sites to the growing list of individuals and organizations that say President Obama outright lied about his promises to the American people — that Obamacare wouldn’t take away their existing health care plans.
The Washington Post’s Fact Checker on Thursday affixed a three-out-of-four “Pinocchios” rating to Mr. Obama and to White House press secretary Jay Carney for faulting insurance companies for cancelling insurance policies, instead of Obamacare regulations.
Mr. Carney said, The Blaze reported: “The provision in the law was the manifestation of the assurance that if you have a plan you want to keep, you can keep it. Insurance companies that chose to strip away benefits from existing plans in the interim, that canceled existing plans in the interim, they took away that grandfathering opportunity. And that’s a reality.”
But as The Post pointed out — that’s not true.
Its raters wrote that “blaming the insurance companies can only go so far. … The administration wrote the rules that set the conditions under which plans lose their grandfathered status. But more important, the law has an effective date so far in the past that it virtually guaranteed that the vast majority of people currently in the individual market would end up with a notice saying they needed to buy insurance on the Obamacare exchanges,” The Blaze reported.
A day earlier, the PolitiFact site — which has won Pulitzer honors — gave Mr. Obama its highest ranking for dishonesty, the “Pants on Fire” label, after he tried to revise history on his promise that Americans wouldn’t lose existing health care plans due to Obamacare.
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He said, at a Nov. 4 event, The Blaze reported: “Now, if you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.”
But PolitiFact said, The Blaze reported: “The way we read that comment — and, judging by the contentious White House press briefing the following day, the way other Washington journalists read it — was that Obama was saying that people had been misreporting the pledge he had made. It wasn’t that he said “if you like your plan, you can keep it” — it was “if your plan hasn’t changed since the law passed,” you can keep it.”
The site continued: “We never found an instance in which he offered the caveat that it only applies to plans that hadn’t changed after the law’s passage. And seven of those 37 cases came after the release of the HHS regulations that defined the ’grandfathering’ process, when the impact would be clear.”
For that, PolitiFact gave him the “Pants on Fire” rating, The Blaze said.
Meanwhile, a month ago, The Post gave Mr. Obama “Four Pinocchios,” the highest dishonesty rating, for saying repeatedly that anyone who wanted to keep their insurance plan could.
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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