What’s Obama’s problem? The Wash Post’s Dana Milbank “explains”:
In one account of what even administration officials acknowledge is a debacle, the Wall Street Journal reported that Obama’s policy advisers were aware long ago that the president’s promise that “if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it” wouldn’t hold up. “White House policy advisers objected to the breadth of Mr. Obama’s ‘keep your plan’ promise,” the Journal reported, citing a former senior administration official. “They were overruled by political aides,” the former official said. The White House said it was unaware of the objections.”
I admit that I find this confusing. White House policy advisors tell White House political aides that the president shouldn’t be saying “if you like it you can keep it,” and the “White House” says “it” didn’t know about this. Hmmmmm.
Well, I think we can skip all this “who knew” jive. President Obama is renowned for his detailed grasp of policy issues. Anyone reading liberal outlets has known for several years that one of the goals of the Affordable Care Act was to force insurers to stop selling what liberals regarded as “crappy,” useless catastrophic insurance packages that did not help pay for routine health maintenance procedures, which is what liberals mean by “health care.” And surely Obama knew this too. And surely what Obama “meant” was, “if you have a decent health care plan, you can keep it. If you don’t, we’ll force your insurer to give you one.”
Obama and his aides might have figured that some people would not benefit from this favor they intended to provide. Some people with catastrophic insurance might be actually suffering from a catastrophic illness, and might in fact be receiving high-quality, low-cost care. For such people, the loss of their crappy insurance plan might mean, well, death.
So maybe both Obama and his advisors should have thought a little more than they did. But to claim that Obama didn’t know that what he was saying was nothing more than a deliberate half truth is a lie.
Afterwords
Milbanks is even more laughable when he expands his bubble theory to “explain” the war in Iraq. Supposedly, late in his presidency, Dub-Ya complained to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Admiral Mike Mullen that “when I made the decision on Iraq, I went around the room to everybody at that table, every principal. ‘You in? Any doubts?’ Nothing from anybody.”
If George really said that, my opinion of him just sunk a couple of inches. Really, George? You tell your staff that quote “I’m going to kick Saddam Hussein’s motherfucking ass all over the Middle East” and then you expect someone to pipe up and say “Golly gee, Mr. President. If you did that, you’d be making a huge mistake?” It’s a matter of record, which Milbank surely ought to know, that people in the Bush Administration who cast doubt on the invasion of Iraq were either silenced or bounced. The notion that Bush was failed by his advisors is nonsense.
