“If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period.”
How many times did we hear that? In the Rose Garden, during the State of the Union address, in the pressroom, on the campaign trail and in his weekly Internet addresses, President Barack Obama told us this. And we believed him. So much so that he was re-elected in a decisive victory over Gov. Romney in 2012. This phrase embodied the Affordable Care Act — at least until last week.
Americans are being told they will not be able to keep their health plan. Millions of people are opening letters saying Obamacare has made their policies illegal. My own father was told by his employer that his company will have to look for a new plan because theirs was deemed subpar. This must be a fluke. It must be a problem the government didn’t foresee.
But it isn’t. And it wasn’t. Last week, several media outlets began reporting that, as Obama touted his famous phrase, the White House was estimating about seven million people would lose insurance. They knew. We were told otherwise. In fact, Marc A. Thiessen of The Washington Post wrote Obama’s aides advised him to tweak his tagline. It was misleading. They knew, from day one, Americans would lose insurance. Yet the line stayed.
As expected, the Obama administration has responded to the issue. It says any plan enacted before the law was passed would be left untouched for another year. What the administration failed to mention was if the plan changed in any way — Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, testified that an increase of $5 constituted a change — the plan was no longer protected. How could they expect a plan to stay completely unchanged over three years? So why mislead the American people?
Easy. If they actually knew they would lose their insurance, their opinion of the plan would sour. They would use their vote to change things. But that didn’t happen, and they didn’t know. And here we are today. Prices are going up for plans. Families are losing their doctors. This is what I, and the American people, must live through. People can’t keep their plans, and the White House knew from the beginning. Period.
William Stahovec is a UF engineering freshman. This guest column ran on page 7 on 11/15/2013 under the headline "Obamacare tagline misleads"
