Mona Charen writes in The National Review, The Lies That Sold Obamacare.
Excerpt:
Remember Obama’s mother? Though the airwaves currently echo with the vow, “If you like your plan . . . ,” I keep remembering Obama’s account of his mother being denied coverage by her insurance company as she lay dying of cancer.
The moving and infuriating story was a staple on the 2008 campaign trail. His mother had insurance, he explained, but when she came down with cancer, her insurance company claimed that her disease was a “preexisting” condition and refused to pay for her treatment. In a debate with John McCain, Obama said:
For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a preexisting condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.
There would be, if it had been true. But when New York Times reporter Janny Scott researched the issue for her biography of the president’s mother, she discovered letters proving beyond a doubt that CIGNA never denied Dunham coverage for her disease. The dispute was over a disability plan that would have paid some of Dunham’s other expenses.
The White House did not deny Scott’s account, but shrugged it off as something that had happened long ago. Not so long that it couldn’t be milked one last time, though, for a 2012 campaign film. In The Road We’ve Traveled, the message remained unchanged — a greedy insurance company had cut off Stanley Ann Dunham at her moment of maximum vulnerability and cost her her life.
If someone comes to you and asks for financial aid to cope with a family member who is gravely ill, and you comply, how are you going to feel when you learn that there is no sick relative? It’s different in politics, explained Michael Cohen, in theNew York Daily News. The American people want too many contradictory things. “Seemingly the only path to change is telling voters what they want to hear.”
Doubtless that’s what Mr. Obama tells himself to justify his deceptions. It’s a form of “lying for justice.” If your goals are noble enough, truth is an acceptable casualty.
HKO
Data was distorted to to create an illusion that there were more uninsured than there was. Data was manipulated to create the illusion that our health care system was of lower quality than it was. And the gullible public swiftly bought these fables even though their very eyes told them otherwise.
The Democrats use anecdotes to create the need for state intervention. There will always be anecdotes of system failures but that is no way to set policy. But even when these emotional anecdotes prove false, the lies are justified because they serve a higher end: the ends justify the means. It is infuriating to have the likes of Pelosi to tell us how substandard our policies were when the majority of us would gladly return to them over the mess that she and her party created.
Like so many government initiatives they want to provide a benefit (in exchange for votes and power) but they do not want to pay for it, so they create some Rube Goldberg economic fantasy to hide the true cost from everyone- especially themselves. Only an economic fool would believe that some arrogant, all knowing elitist ass can centrally set prices for anything – wages, healthcare, energy, – ANYTHING -without significant consequences: some easily predictable but often not. It did not work for Stalin, Mao, Nixon, or Carter and it will not work for our current incarnation of the All Knowing Wizard.
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