But back to the meat of Avik Roy’s “fact-checking” the president’s apology. Things have come to a pretty pass when you must fact-check apologies. The president made an awful lot about the relatively small 5% of people who will be affected. For me, that was a serious problem with the PPACA as written. An awful lot of pain was going to be imposed on an awful lot of people with an awful lot of attendant political sniping on behalf of so small an outcome. In my early posts on the subject I referred to it as a sort of “Wales syndrome”, hearkening back to a line from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons.
Writing at the Tribune that wasn’t lost on Lynn Sweet, either:
The 5 percent reference is about folks who bought individual policies after the law became effective in 2010. Under the new law kicking in now, if those policies don’t pass federal muster, insurance companies must stopping selling them.
What the administration never appreciated was that people get new plans all the time — but they hardly noticed because it seemed more like an automatic renewal, albeit often with higher costs. A cancellation letter gets your attention.
The Obama team has been relying on legalistic technicalities in keeping the misleading language in his remarks.
Obama kept using that 5 percent figure in his interview with Todd in an attempt to put the situation in perspective. But if you are one of the 5 percent and are angry and feel duped — I don’t blame you. You are entitled to your story.
Now the president and his surrogates are rushing around, lying about lying, making excuses for the, in their own words, inexcuseable over a trade-off. They have decided to help 2% of the people (that’s the number the CBO estimated would enroll for insurance through the exchanges) at most certainly the expense of 5% of the people and probably of 98% of the people.
The gamble is that in November 2014 everyone will have forgotten all about it. Frankly, I doubt it. They’ll be reminded every time they get a premium increase and, fair or not, Democrats will own those since they’ll be blamed on the PPACA whether the PPACA had anything to do with them or not.
