Nadir Of Deceit

It’s all out in the open now. Not even the Main Stream Media is willing to continue the cover-up:

Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”

None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date -- the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example -- the policy would not be grandfathered.

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”

That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them. Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”

“This says that when they made the promise, they knew half the people in this market outright couldn’t keep what they had and then they wrote the rules so that others couldn’t make it either,” said Robert Laszewski, of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, a consultant who works for health industry firms. Laszewski estimates that 80 percent of those in the individual market will not be able to keep their current policies and will have to buy insurance that meets requirements of the new law, which generally requires a richer package of benefits than most policies today.

But will the White House admit to its deception, even indirectly? Not a chance:

Today, White House spokesman Jay Carney was asked about the president’s promise that consumers would be able to keep their health care. “What the president said and what everybody said all along is that there are going to be changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act to create minimum standards of coverage, minimum services that every insurance plan has to provide,” Carney said. “So it's true that there are existing healthcare plans on the individual market that don't meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act.”

Color me unsurprised.

---

There is no need in human life so great as that men should trust one another and should trust their government, should believe in promises, and should keep promises in order that future promises may be believed in and in order that confident cooperation may be possible. Good faith -- personal, national, and international -- is the first prerequisite of decent living, of the steady going on of industry, of governmental financial strength, and of international peace. -- Benjamin M. Anderson, Economics and the Public Welfare: A Financial and Economic History of the United States, 1914 -- 1946

I may have cited the statement above, penned by one of the Twentieth Century’s foremost economic analysts, as many as a hundred times. I can find no fault with it except the one fingered by Leo Tolstoy:

In order to obtain and hold power, a man must love it. Thus the effort to get it is not likely to be coupled with goodness, but with the opposite qualities of pride, cunning, and cruelty.

Barack Hussein Obama’s entire adult life has been devoted to the quest for power. He is not satisfied with a president’s Constitutionally delegated authority; he wants the unbounded decretal power of an absolute monarch. He believes he deserves it. Such a man is unlikely to regard us hoi polloi with benevolence, or even respect. Even if Tolstoy’s logic were faulty, in Obama’s case the evidence speaks unambiguously.

The very worst cases of power-lust involve men in love with their images of themselves as Great Men: that element of Mankind destined to shape history by insight, effort, and will. Obama is clearly such a man (“You know, I actually believe my own bullshit.... I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”). In his imagination, History alone can judge him; his contemporaries are not qualified to do so. That places him above all common standards and beyond all ethical constraints: such rules are for the “little people.”

Other evidence scattered over the Obamunist Interregnum makes it clear that the “little people” includes the potentates of other nations. Unfortunately, whatever Obama might think of his deceptive skills, he and his hirelings have failed to becloud those men and women. In consequence, America’s traditional allies no longer trust us, while our adversaries hold us in ever-deepening contempt.

---

Jimmy Carter, though a total failure as a president, was nevertheless an honest man. To the best of my ability to determine, he never even shaded the truth in any way. More, he was greatly upset when he discovered that the Soviet ambassador had lied to his face concerning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, even though most high officials would regard such deceits as merely “diplomacy.” In that regard, Carter was in accord with the American tradition of honesty and candid dealing. Indeed, his unabashed honesty might have been the asset that won him the White House.

Morally and ethically, Barack Hussein Obama is the diametric opposite of Jimmy Carter. He prefers to lie, in part because it pleases him to “put one over” on the groundlings, and in part because his agenda is better served by lies than by truths. But as a certain Robert A. Heinlein has told us:

A thousand truths do not mark a man as a truth-teller, but a single lie marks him as a damned liar....Lying to other people is your business, but I tell you this: once a man gets a reputation as a liar, he might as well be struck dumb, for people do not listen to the wind.

At this point in his inglorious career, the only people who will continue to repose confidence in any statement from Obama, or from any of his henchmen, will be those who, like him, believe that deceit is indispensable to the success of their hate-filled, wholly destructive agenda. Decent Americans will assume that he’s lying at all times and on all subjects.

The damage Obama has done will not be confined to him and his lieutenants, nor even to the Democratic Party. By his actions, including his employment of subordinate prevaricators such as Hillary Clinton and Kathleen Sebelius and “spokesmen” such as Jay Carney, he has called into question whether public officials should ever be trusted. Whether it will ever again be possible for a decent American to believe any statement made by an official above the level of a Town Clerk remains to be seen.