What was obviously a lie turns out to have been ... a lie

As even the mainstream press seems to be coming to the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, the President oversold the "Affordable Care Act," I look back to what I wrote about it four years ago.

So they can put together a bill that's going to a) add 15 (or 30 or 47, depending on the President's mood, apparently) million people to the insurance rolls b) while providing improved care c) at lower cost for everyone d) and allowing everyone to keep the coverage they've already got if they want to e) and not increasing the budget deficit f) or increasing taxes¹, but they can't post that freakin' bill on the internet?...

It boggles my mind that anyone can watch any part of this process and think, "yes, this is how we're going to make the health care system better for everyone! What could possibly go wrong?"


¹ - Every time I write that out, I vacillate between giggling and rage. I giggle that the preposterousness of the suggestion, that there's somehow, some way that increased government intervention is going to lead to any one of those things happening, never mind all six simultaneously, and rage that the President of the United States actually thinks that the US citizens are stupid enough to buy it. He doesn't even have enough respect for the people of this country to try a plausible argument.

Health insurance cancellation notices soar above Obamacare enrollment rates

Katie McHugh, The Daily Caller:

Hundreds of thousands of Americans who purchase their own health insurance have received cancellation notices since August because the plans do not meet Obamacare’s requirements.

The number of cancellation notices greatly exceed the number of Obamacare enrollees.

What was that line, again?

Oh, yeah...

No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.

- Candidate Barack Obama

I'd feel abused and lied to if I'd ever believed it. Since what he was saying wasn't possible, there was never any reason for anyone to have believed it. Sadly, many did...

"Lies, scandal and politics: Benghazi"

Remember that classic statement of high moral indignation from the President during the second debate? About how outrageous it would be for anyone to suggest that he, or anyone else in his administration, might even consider the possibility of misleading the American people about terrorist attacks for the purpose of political gain?

Yeah. Right.

Danielle Pletka:

Luckily, Reuters now tells us what really happened before the President hit the Rose Garden on 9/12: Within minutes of the attack the day before, the White House received three emails. Here are the three subject lines for those emails, which spanned a couple of hours from the beginning of the terrorists’ move:

Email one: ”U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi Under Attack” and the notation “SBU,” meaning “Sensitive But Unclassified.”
Email two: “Update 1: U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi”
Email three: ”Update 2: Ansar al-Sharia Claims Responsibility for Benghazi Attack.”

Bottom line? Barack Obama was willfully and knowingly lying to the American people. Why? To protect the meme that he had al Qaeda and affiliates/sympathizers like Libya’s Ansar al Sharia on the run.

Why the "tax cut lie" is Obama's, not Romney's...

The USA widget company has some serious problems. They've been running in the red for a couple of years, and they can't seem to get their costs under control. They've got a decent product, but their price list is quite complex, fairly high in nominal terms, with various discounts for volume purchase, and other things, and their market share is slipping.

Two of their Vice Presidents are the likeliest candidates to replace the outgoing CEO. One of them, VP Mitt, has a plan to increase market share by cutting prices across the board, and reducing or removing some of the deductions and sales bonuses that distort the pricing. He believes that these changes will increase market share, increase product moved, and be at least revenue neutral, and in the best case, better than that.

VP Barry disagrees, so he's tells everyone that he sees that VP Mitt has a plan to cut company revenues by $5 million. (He gets that $5 million number by looking at the price reduction, ignoring the removal of the deductions, assuming that the reduction in sales price results in no additional sales, and then multiplying by 10 to get a 10 year cost.) And sure enough, he assigns a member of his staff to do an analysis, and it "proves" that Mitt's plan results in $5 million of lost revenue. So he tells everyone about the plan, asking "how can we close our budget gap if we give away $5 million, mostly to our biggest, wealthiest customers?"

VP Mitt looks at the analysis, and has several other analysts address it. They all agree that the analysis ignores important facts, and that the plan Mitt has proposed is not only possible, but likely. 

The two candidates get up in front of the shareholders at the annual meeting, and three times, VP Barry accuses VP Mitt of planning a $5 million giveaway to the biggest customers. And three times, VP Mitt corrects him.

And yet the next day, VP Barry goes out to members of the board of directors, and not only repeats the $5 million analysis, he accused VP Mitt of lying about it, and of disowning his own plan during the shareholders meeting.

So who is the liar here?


That's what's happening in the Presidential campaign. Three times, during the first presidential debate, President Obama accused Governor Romney of supporting a "$5 Trillion tax cut." And three times, Governor Romney rebutted it.

BO: Governor Romney’s central economic plan calls for a $5 trillion tax cut...

MR: I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don’t have a tax cut of a scale that you’re talking about. My view is that we ought to provide tax relief to people in the middle class. But I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people.

...

BO: Governor Romney’s proposal that he has been promoting for 18 months calls for a $5 trillion tax cut...

MR: if the tax plan he described were a tax plan I was asked to support, I’d say absolutely not. I’m not looking for a $5 trillion tax cut. What I’ve said is I won’t put in place a tax cut that adds to the deficit.

...

BO: If you believe that we can cut taxes by $5 trillion and ... somehow you will not end up picking up the tab, then Governor Romney’s plan may work for you.

MR: I’m not in favor of a $5 trillion tax cut. That’s not my plan. My plan is not to put in place any tax cut that will add to the deficit...So you may keep referring to it as a $5 trillion tax cut, but that’s not my plan.

In the eyes of President Obama's supporters, both inside and outside of the media, this makes Governor Romney a liar. And to cheers of acclaim, the President went out on the campaign trail the next day to continue pushing both the tax cut number and the "Romney lied" meme.

“We had our first debate last night,” Obama said at an outdoor event at Sloan’s Lake Park in Denver on Thursday. “When I got onto the stage I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney. But it couldn’t have been Mitt Romney, because the real Mitt Romney has been running around the country all year promising $5 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy. The fellow onstage last night said he didn’t know anything about that.”

That?   That's a lie.

Period.

Oh, that last part is a lie, too.

Different analyses yield different results. And it's true that there is an analysis, from a partisan liberal source, suggesting that Governor Romney cannot put together a tax plan that meets the criteria he claims his plan will meet. But there are other analyses pointing out the holes in that one.  What we've got here is two different potential projections for 10 year effects of a plan that's not fully defined yet.  And one candidate (Obama) is calling the other (Romney) a liar because he disagrees with his projection. 

And the two candidates are talking in different terms, as well. 

• Governor Romney is proposing a tax cut, defined as a reduction in tax rates.  
• President Obama is talking about a tax cut, defined as a reduction in the revenues collected by the Federal government. 

The former may lead to the latter, but it is by no means certain.  It is Governor Romney's position that reducing rates while eliminating deductions will broaden the tax base and spur growth, resulting in no reduction of revenue.  It is President Obama's position that any reduction in rates has only one effect - lost revenues.  No broadening or deductions or growth to "offset," just lost revenue.

And it isn't enough for him or his supporters to disagree with the analysis.  No, they are so convinced of their position that Romney's not only wrong, he's lying.

Well, someone's been lying on this issue.  A lot.

And it's not Governor Romney.

Here's one thing that is clearly true.  It takes years to determine the end result of any change in tax rates or deductions.  And even hindsight is not 20/20, because nothing happens in a vacuum.  If Romney is elected and signs a new tax package in to law, we'll be able to say, with some confidence, what federal revenues actually are.  What we'll never be able to say with certainty, is what they would have been in different circumstances.



Note that, when challenged, even Obama's campaign admits that the "five trillion dollar tax cut" is a lie.

Well, stipulated, it won't be near five trillion dollars...

- Obama campaign spokesman Stephanie Cutter

An Incriminating Timeline: The Obama Administration and Libya

Another reminder of the Obama administration's peculiar relationship with the truth, as the hearings take place on Capitol Hill. This one, from The Heritage Foundation...

New evidence shows there were security threats in Libya in the months prior to the deadly September 11 attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Despite these threats, the State Department left its personnel there to fend for themselves.

And when the terrorist attack did take place, the Obama Administration peddled the ridiculous story that an offensive, amateurish, anti-Islam YouTube video was to blame in order to avoid characterizing the murders of four Americans as terrorism.

Not only did the United States have an ambassador, and three other staff, killed in an entirely forseeable (and forwarned) Al Qaeda attack on 9/11, the administration spent two weeks peddling the ludicrous fiction that the attack was a "spontaneous" reaction to an internet video, and even condemned the filmmaker, who was then arrested, ostensibly for parole violations, but really for exercising his free speech rights in a manner disapproved of by the President.

But hey, he doesn't like (or maybe even understand) Governor Romney's tax plan, so that makes Romney the "liar"...

Medicare actuary: Democrats' health care claims "false, more so than true..."

In testimony offered today Medicare Chief Actuary Richard Foster told the House Budget Committee that

Two of the central promises of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul law are unlikely to be fulfilled, Medicare's independent economic expert told Congress on Wednesday.

The landmark legislation probably won't hold costs down, and it won't let everybody keep their current health insurance if they like it, Chief Actuary Richard Foster told the House Budget Committee. His office is responsible for independent long-range cost estimates.

To quote BJ Honeycutt, "you could have knocked me over with a sledge-hammer."

Foster says analysis by his office shows that the health care law will raise the nation's health care tab modestly because newly insured people will be getting medical services they would have otherwise gone without.

Gosh, there's a shock, huh? There's going to add people, who are going to get more care, and it's going to cost more. Who'd'a thunk it? I mean, other than anyone who actually, you know, thought about it for 20 seconds.

None of this is surprising in the least. It was easily forseeable. And forseen. And shouted out about by many of us. As I said a year ago,

This is a delusional bill that allows the people who support it to climb into bed at night secure in their virtue, because they "care" about "the less fortunate," and ignore the fact that it's going to drive up costs, drive up premiums, put people out of work, put companies out of business, stop innovation and bring the country closer to the brink of bankruptcy.

And the President, and Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi, stood up and lied to the American people over, and over, and over again. The Democrats lied about it during the repeal debate last week, the President lied about it again last night.


Of course, it would have been nice to get this testimony before passing that monstrosity...

Q: How can you tell that Barack Obama is lying?

Q: How can you tell that Barack Obama is lying?
A: He's talking about health care.

Matt Welch asks, Can Obama Open His Mouth Without Lying About Health Care?

The answer is, unfortunately, self-evident. For those who don't yet recognize it,

...The president said he "didn't campaign on the public option," but it turns out he did. He said that there wasn't any "gap" between his campaign promises and the final result, but it turns out there were several, as detectable by the most cursory Google search. He said "every single criteria for reform I put forward is in this bill," but it turns out they're not.

It's seems incredible to say this, but he may be a bigger liar than the last Democratic President. Bill Clinton.

George Will, and Presidential veracity thoughts

The late Michael Kelly once wrote a column in which he claimed to believe Bill Clinton. As he walked through all of the things that Clinton had said which were mutually exclusive with other things that Clinton had said, it was a devastating indictment of Clinton's veracity and believability.

I believe the president. I have always believed him. I believed him when he said he had never been drafted in the Vietnam War and I believed him when he said he had forgotten to mention that he had been drafted in the Vietnam War. I believed him when he said he hadn't had sex with Gennifer Flowers and I believe him now, when he reportedly says he did.

What George Will has done this week with Barack Obama is not the same thing. But I was reminded of the Kelly column when reading Will.

His speech to Congress was the 122nd time he had publicly discussed health care. Just 14 hours would pass before the 123rd, on Thursday morning. His incessant talking cannot combat what it has caused: An increasing number of Americans do not believe that he believes what he says.

...

He deplores "scare tactics" but says that unless he gets his way, people will die. He praises temperate discourse but says many of his opponents are liars. He says Medicare is an exemplary program that validates government's prowess at running health systems. But he also says Medicare is unsustainable and going broke, and that he will pay for much of his reforms by eliminating the hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud in this paragon of a program, and in Medicaid. He says Congress will cut Medicare (it will not) by $500 billion—without affecting benefits. He says the nation's economic health depends on controlling health-care costs. Yet so important is the trial bar in financing the Democratic Party, he says not a syllable in significant and specific support of tort reforms that could save hundreds of billions of dollars by reducing "defensive medicine" intended to protect not patients from illnesses but doctors from lawyers.

I had a discussion with a friend earlier this week about the Joe Wilson outburst, as the result of a Facebook poll in which he had voted that Wilson was wrong. (For the record, Wilson was clearly right and clearly out of line. It was inapproporiate to do what he did.) I said that it was clear that Wilson was right, and that Obama had lied repeatedly during the speech. To which he responded, "I'm also not sure where else you think Obama was lying."

Well, pretty much every time that his lips moved.

How about this: "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. Period."

That's a lie. He's lying. He'll sign whatever he can get through Congress, and regardless of the fact that the CBO clearly says that all of the proposed plans result in significant, dare I say "spiraling," increases in the deficit, they're desperately trying to push something through. That comment was a lie.


How about this: "Reducing the waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid will pay for most of this plan."

That's a lie. There's nowhere near enough waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid¹ to pay any significant portion of the cost of "this plan," assuming that "this plan" includes the things that it looks like it will include. That comment was a lie.


How about this: "One man from Illinois lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found that he hadn’t reported gallstones that he didn’t even know about. They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it."

He briefly lost his coverage, it was quickly restored, the treatments were not delayed, and he lived another 3 1/2 years.


I can't prove that this is a lie, but I can look at his track record and say that I don't believe him when he says: "My guiding principle is, and always has been, that consumers do better when there is choice and competition."

When he says, "But thanks to the bold and decisive action we have taken since January, I can stand here with confidence and say that we have pulled this economy back from the brink." I say he's lying. I might buy mistaken, because anyone clueless enough to support that idiotic "cash for clunkers" as an economic boon clearly doesn't have a hint of a clue about how the economy works, but I think he understands, and doesn't like it. I think he knows he's making things worse, and that's how he's going to "remake America" the way he wants to.

This is a lie that may technically be true: "Let me repeat this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have." For some people, it's technically true that nothing requires them to change plans. There is a whole lot in the plan, however, that will change the plans themselves, and with any changes, the plan does require people to go through the government coordinated insurance exchange. The bottom line on this is, no matter how happy you are with your current coverage, doctor, or plan, the plans being debated, and which Obama hopes to sign, are overwhelmingly likely to radically change, or even eliminate, what you currently have.

I'll finish with this - I think I've said it before, but let me say it again. What Barack Obama says, when he stands in front of the country, is this: My plan will give more people more and better care while cutting costs for everyone. That's obviously nonsense, economics from fantasy land. It's wishful thinking masquerading as public policy, and I don't see how anyone could possibly believe it.



¹ - By the way, if there is that much "waste and fraud" in Medicare and Medicaid, why on earth do we have to wait to pass a massive new entitlement program before we clean up the massive old entitlement programs? If things are as bad as he says they are financially, wouldn't cleaning up that much "waste and fraud" from existing programs make far more sense than starting new ones? These are obviously rhetorical questions. While there's almost certainly plenty of "waste and fraud" in the existing programs, there's nowhere near enough to cover a massive new entitlement, nor is there any true interest on the party of big government to actually reduce the cost of those programs.

Was Joe Wilson right?

Before the speech:

During consideration of the health care reform bill (H.R. 3200), the House Ways & Means Committee rejected an amendment that would have helped ensure illegal aliens would not receive taxpayer-funded health care benefits.

After the speech:

Today, for the first time as far as we know, the administration is backing a provision that would require proof of citizenship before someone could enroll in a plan selected on the exchange.

Here, the administration also concedes that hospitals would be compensated with public funds for the care of undocumented immigrants.

So is it a lie if one says something that one knows isn't true, but then changes one's position after being accused of lying?