In June 2009, as health-care reform was being debated vigorously across the country, President Obama told the American Medical Association’s convention that, whatever the provisions of the health-care bill he would sign into law ultimately included, “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.”
After the Affordable Care Act lurched into effect in 2013, it became clear the president meant to say that if you like your doctor and health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep them . . . footnote. And, as you’d expect from a former editor of theHarvard Law Review, that footnote has turned out to be as long and convoluted as a Russian novel.
When people who did like their health-care plans started receiving notices of cancellation or enormous rate increases, Obama’s defenders tried to qualify the original promise, which Obama had made repeatedly while campaigning, first for president and then for enactment of new health-care policies. Economist Jared Bernstein, who worked in the White House in 2009, said a better formulation would have been, “If you like your plan and it doesn’t get significantly worse such that it’s out of sync with what we’re trying to do here, you can keep it.” In fact, he argued, because “such nuances were clear at the time” — which is not how nuances typically operate — Obama’s veracity about his proposals’ consequences was not in question.
The New York Times editorial page took the same position: The president “clearly misspoke” when he promised that people could keep health-insurance policies they liked, but the controversy over that pledge was “overblown.” After the sanitizing “misspoke” set off a controversy of its own, the paper’s “public editor” proddedchief editorialist Andrew Rosenthal, who allowed that “clearly wrong” or “clearly weren’t true” might also have been fair characterizations of Obama’s promises.
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