{"id":23267,"date":"2013-10-29T21:42:52","date_gmt":"2013-10-30T01:42:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thedailygouge.com\/?p=23267"},"modified":"2013-10-29T21:48:29","modified_gmt":"2013-10-30T01:48:29","slug":"the-daily-gouge-wednesday-october-30th-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thedailygouge.com\/?p=23267","title":{"rendered":"The Daily Gouge, Wednesday, October 30th, 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s Wednesday, October 30th, 2013…and here’s The Gouge!<\/strong><\/p>\n

First up, though it’s only the 30th, as Mark Tapscott reveals in the Morning Examiner, <\/em>for taxpaying Americans, Trick or Treat came early this year:<\/strong><\/p>\n

NBC says Obama knew three years ago millions would lose coverage<\/span><\/h1>\n

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Uh oh. Mention “Obamacare” and most Americans are likely to think of President Obama’s May 2009 declaration that “if you like your present health plan, you can keep it.” Now it turns out “millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years<\/em><\/span>.”<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

That’s according to an NBC News investigation by reporters Lisa Myers and Hannah Rappleye. Myers is a widely respected senior investigative reporter with NBC who covered the White House for the Washington Star before moving into broadcast journalism. Rappleye is an independent investigative journalist who lists on her LinkedIn page her membership in the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundation.<\/p>\n

As significant as where<\/em><\/span> it comes from, however, what makes the NBC report especially significant is its substance<\/em><\/span>, which undermines Obama’s credibility on the central claim in his campaign for Obamacare<\/em><\/span>:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

“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\u2019t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. <\/em><\/p>\n

“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,’\u201d according to Myers and Rappleye<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Myers and Rappleye found an estimate buried in Department of Health and Human Services Obamacare regulations that as many as 67 percent of people who buy their health insurance through the individual market would lose their coverage. Yet, until this week neither Obama nor any of his spokesmen qualified the claim that people would be able to keep coverage they like.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Imagine that, a Washington professional politician claiming one thing all the while knowing that virtually the exact opposite was the truth?<\/p>\n

As Jonathan Strong details at NRO<\/em>‘s The Corner<\/em>, the rest of the Dimocratic leadership knew it too:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Top Dem Admits: \u2018We Knew\u2019<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/h1>\n

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House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer conceded to reporters today that Democrats knew people would not be able to keep their current health care plans under Obamacare and expressed qualified contrition for President Obama\u2019s repeated vows to the contrary.<\/span> \u201cWe knew that there would be some policies that would not qualify and therefore people would be required to get more extensive coverage,\u201d Hoyer said in response to a question from National Review.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Asked by another reporter how repeated statements by Obama to the contrary weren\u2019t \u201cmisleading,\u201d Hoyer said \u201cI don\u2019t think the message was wrong<\/em><\/span>. I think the message was accurate.<\/span> It was not precise<\/span> enough<\/em>\u2026[it] should have been caveated<\/span> with \u2013 \u2018assuming you have a policy that in fact does do what the bill is designed to do<\/span><\/em>.\u2019\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Hoyer noted that people losing access to their current plans are mostly in the individual market, which is a small segment of the overall market. He also argued requiring those plans to follow new mandates and regulations was important for ensuring those plans included \u201cadequate coverage so the public would not have to be on the hook for serious illnesses or other illnesses.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

And so the patent prevarication begins, as every leading Lib and MSM shill attempts to follow the White House line by offering the same, tired talking points about how a lie isn’t really a lie, as long as The Dear Misleader’s telling it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

For more on this latest Progressive assault on common sense, we turn to Joel Gehrke and the Washington Examiner<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Obamacare team offers multiple self-contradictory explanations for coverage cancellations<\/span><\/h1>\n

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Chris, please tell us again who the full-time liars are?!?<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Government proponents of Obamacare are offering incoherent and sometimes self-contradictory explanations for why insurance companies are canceling plans, despite President Obama’s promise that people would be able to keep their plans.<\/p>\n

“There’s nothing in the health care law that makes insurers force people out of plans that consumers were enrolled in before the law,” Julie Bataille, communications director at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told reporters during a conference call Tuesday. “The fact is that companies are starting to upgrade the quality of their plans to put in place the new benefits and protections that all consumers will have available to them moving forward,” she said.<\/p>\n

Those two sentences, uttered in one breath, cannot both be true. It’s not possible to maintain honestly that “there’s nothing” in Obamacare that makes companies change plans and then take credit for the companies deciding to “upgrade the quality of their plans.” <\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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If you thought signing up was great, wait until the government’s overseeing your life-saving surgery!<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Bataille’s argument is at odds with White House press secretary Jay Carney’s admission that “it’s true that there are existing health care plans on the individual market that don’t meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act.”<\/p>\n

And Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., argued Tuesday that insurance companies aren’t really sending out “cancellation notices,” they’re just trying to “help people transition to a new policy<\/span><\/em>.”<\/span> Levin’s argument is contradicted by the same insurance executive whom he cited while making the claim.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Florida Blue CEO Patrick Geraghty contradicted Bataille and Levin by telling NBC that “what we’ve been doing is informing folks that their plan doesn’t meet the test of the essential health benefits [in Obamacare], therefore they have a choice of many options that we make available through the exchange.”<\/p>\n

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James Tiberius Kirk wanted us to pass on a few more selected quotes from the devoted disciples of Kenya’s missing Village Idiot:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Time magazine’s Kate Pickert<\/strong><\/span> was unfazed by the revelation that President Obama lied to the American people when he promised that folks would be able to keep their existing insurance plans.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sure,\u00a0“President Obama has broken his promise that Americans who like their health insurance plans can keep them under the Affordable Care Act,” Pickert offered in her Monday evening post, “The Bright Side of Obamacare’s Broken Promise,”\u00a0“[b]ut the truth is that only a small percentage of Americans will have their health insurance choices narrowed because of the ACA.” What’s more, Pickert insisted, the plan that folks will have to buy (quite often at an inflated cost over the plans they liked but lost) will be better, because, well, the government is mandating all sorts of new, costly goodies in them”…<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Sure…like prenatal and pregnancy care for seniors and drug treatment for those who’ve never even smelled weed!<\/strong><\/p>\n

National Journal<\/span> reports that in testimony today before the House Ways and Means Committee, Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services (known as CMS and the agency that gave us that brilliant Web launch)<\/strong><\/span>, “defended President Obama’s repeated claim that ‘if you like your plan, you can keep it.’\u00a0“<\/em><\/p>\n

“Half of the people in the individual market prior to 2010 didn’t stay on their policies,” Tavenner explained. “They were either kicked off for pre-existing conditions, they saw their premiums go up at least 20 percent a year, and there were no protections for them. And sometimes they were in plans that they thought were fine until they actually needed to hospitalization, and they found out it didn’t cover hospitalization [sic] or it didn’t cover cancer.” The report adds that Tavenner “maintained that premium increases were occurring long before Obamacare.”<\/strong><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

As Best of the Web<\/em>‘s James Taranto noted, “Tavenner’s (obviously nonsensical) implication is that because ObamaCare didn’t cause all rate increases and policy cancellations, it didn’t cause any of them. It is actually more reasonable to count all post-ObamaCare cancellations, even those that didn’t result from changes in the law, against the president, whose promise that “you can keep it” was unqualified<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was caveated just fine, claims Jay Carney the White House press secretary.<\/strong> “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,” NBC quotes him as saying.<\/span> “So it’s true that there are existing health-care plans on the individual market that don’t meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act.”<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Taranto replies, “We don’t remember the president’s saying that, but it’s possible that he did. The (stipulated) fact that Obama said something true does not change the fact that he repeatedly and memorably said something untrue<\/em>.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

We don’t remember him saying that at all<\/em><\/span>…EVER<\/em><\/span>!\u00a0 But we report, you decide; listen to this next video clip and tell us if YOU<\/em><\/span> detect any ambiguity:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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