Surely you remember, a couple of years ago, when President Obama’s blithe promise, “If you like your insurance, you can keep it”, was given four Pinocchios, or three enchiladas, or whatever, and labeled and ridiculed as the “Lie of the Year”. Well, I’ve been reading Steven Brill’s book, America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System, which naturally mentions this most gratuitous of self-inflicted wounds in some detail, yet still has me wondering, what was the deal with the Obama White House?
As Brill tells it, Obama, and virtually everyone else in the White House, was blindsided by the news that millions of people would lose their health insurance policies because the policies didn’t meet the new legislation’s standards for quality health insurance. Only a few wonks in the White House Office of Health Reform knew what was coming and they had assumed it would be no big deal because people could just go online and sign up for “good” health insurance via Obamacare.
Of course, that wasn’t the case, since the Obamacare website was at that time floating like a bloated dead whale in the Sargasso Sea, but even if it had been up, the president’s promise was still off base, by about ninety feet. What the president meant was, “if we like your insurance, you can keep it. Otherwise, you’ll have to get new insurance, whether you like it or not.”
What’s “funny” is that I knew that what the president was saying wasn’t true, because, like a good little liberal, I’d been reading the New Republic (old version), New York, Slate, Salon, et al., and “everyone” just couldn’t wait for the day when all those bad old insurance policies—those “catastrophic” policies that protect you except when it’s, you know, the wrong catastrophe—would disappear. Liberals hated cut-rate policies with high deductibles, limited coverage, and pay-out maximums and couldn’t wait to see them go.1 It’s amazing to me that none of the “communications” people in the White House knew about this—I guess they were too busy watching TV2—and also amazing to me that people who did know the score, including Jeanne Lambrew, deputy director of the White House Office of Health Reform, who apparently wrote the regs that drove the stake into the heart of the cheap insurance racket, could let the president keep repeating an obvious lie. Even more amazing, though, is that the president himself, the superwonk, didn’t know he was lying. At least, he says he didn’t. Sorry, kids, not impressive.
Afterwords
Peter Orszag,3 who helped design Obamacare, tells us about “actuarial value”—the percentage of your health care costs that your insurance plan will cover—at Bloomberg View. Under Obamacare, insurance plans had to cover at least 60% of costs. However, under the new, improved Trump/Ryancare, well, they won’t. So insurance might get cheaper, but will most definitely get worser.
- Brill did some first-hand research into how the health system works while writing his book when he spent 10 days in the hospital for emergency heart surgery, running up a tab of over $190,000. He talked to people who had a “catastrophic” plan that capped its payout at $50,000. ↩︎
- I am too cheap to pay for cable, and, in any event, can’t stand talking heads, so I don’t know what people were saying, but I would think that someone talked about this on the tube as well. ↩︎
- Orszag did not distinguish himself, in my eyes, at least, by leaving Obama’s Office of Management and Budget and going to “Citigroup”, patting himself as he did so for passing up a (maybe) $200,000 a year academic position for “something harder”—at around $2 or $3 million a year (for starters). Well, that was some time ago, so Pete is probably about $50 million richer than he used to be, but I have to say, the guy knows how Republicans lie about health insurance. ↩︎
