President Pincochio’s Growing Proboscis

The real news this week is not that Barack Obama has knowingly lied since his election—the president is a habitual liar—but that NBC News covered his Big Lie in a big way.

This, after all, is the “news” network that recently ran a week of programming to help Obamacare get off to a good start, by Townhall’s telling, and has not stopped propagandizing for the president since his election. What happened? Is this a mea culpa for dereliction of journalistic duty? Have the culprits in cover-up after cover-up begun to rethink their historic role in bamboozling Boobus Americanus about a matter as crucial as health care? Or has NBC talent lost medical benefits because Obama legislated their plum policies out of existence? One can only hope it’s a bit of both.

The “Obama administration knew millions could not keep their health insurance,” blared the headline on NBCNews.com. Uncharacteristically, network writers even deigned to excerpt one variation on the lie Obama told at least two dozen times, from 2009 through to 2012:

“If you like your health care plan, you will keep it. Or, “If you got health insurance and you like your plan and like your doctor, you will keep your plan, you will keep your doctor.”

Just imagine! NBCNews.com has actually gone after a big news story that disgraces Obama big time, even publishing expert opinion that doesn’t exculpate, but incriminates, the president. To wit, “When they made the promise, they knew half the people in [the individual market] outright couldn’t keep [the policies] they had and then they wrote the rules so that others couldn’t make it either.” The administration “wrote Obamacare rules” cognizant of cutting the ground out from under 14 million policy holders and their dependents.

(Many analysts of the conservative and libertarian persuasion prefigured our current predicament. It is not rocket science, but simple reason. The Big-Media collective, however, is slow, stupid and shackled by ideology. Reality must bite them before they’ll recognize it, much less report it.)

Thus do we learn from “Robert Laszewski … a consultant who works for health industry firms … that 80 percent of those in the individual market will not be able to keep their current policies and will have to buy insurance that meets [the] requirements of the new law, which generally requires a richer package of benefits than most policies today.”

Blurted a Michigan retiree angrily: “[Obama] wrote the regulations so strictly that none of the old polices can grandfather. … I heard him only about a thousand times. I didn’t believe him.”

Voluntarily, 14 million Americans had purchased and paid for their now-obsolete, outlawed health-care insurance. Stated differently, these individuals valued what the policy had to offer more than the money it cost them. They liked the product the president has proscribed. And they don’t like what replaces it.

George Schwab of North Carolina was “‘perfectly happy” to continue paying Blue Cross Blue Shield a premium of $228 a month to insure himself and his wife. President Obama wasn’t having any of it. By legislative fiat, he stopped what was a mutually beneficial arrangement between the two consenting parties.

On Oct. 30, Big Brother Obama claimed that Mr. Schwab and millions of happy customers like him were “underinsured.” So Obama ensured that for “underinsuring” themselves, these Americans would lose their insurance.

Mr. Schwab and his ilk are now without insurance. From the president’s perspective, the 62-year-old man does not know what’s good for him. Fortunately for Mr. Schwab and other clueless clients like him, Big Brother does. To the rescue came Obama. Mr. Schwab had fallen prey to a “bad apple insurer,” grated the president. He is among “five percent of Americans, who’ve got cut-rate plans that don’t offer real financial protection in the event of a serious illness or an accident.”

Foolish Mr. Schwab. He was content with a purchase Mr. Obama deemed “substandard.” Luckily for Mr. Schwab and a million other Americans, so far, the president removed their “substandard plan” before it could hurt them.

Better to be uninsured than to have “substandard” insurance.

Also on Oct. 30 did Mr. Obama vow to the Mr. Schwabs of America—roughly 14 million of them—that they would be “getting a better deal.” “Almost all the insurers,” cooed the president, “are encouraging people to join better plans with the same carrier and stronger benefits and stronger protections while others will be able to get better plans with new carriers through the marketplace …”

Desperate, Mr. Schwab went looking for the Promised Plan.

He discovered that Barack Obama’s command-and-control, nationalized “marketplace” would be charging him $948 a month for a plan that met the president’s requirements, one of which was that everybody must “contribute.” Everyone must “take some measure of responsibility,” preached Obama.

A monthly premium hike of more than 400 percent is to be Mr. Schwab’s “contribution” to the un-Affordable Care Act’s collective kitty. Alas, the plan does not meet Mr. Schwab’s needs. For affordability, too, is a “need.” This American is unable to and uninterested in parting with $948 for the added “benefits” of birth control, maternity and neonatal care, mental-health coverage and addiction disorder services for himself and his 62-year-old spouse.

In other words, Mr. Schwab values the $948 Obama wants him to part with monthly more than the policy Obama has willed him to purchase.

Wait a sec: Didn’t Barack Obama just promise that the “five percent of Americans who buy insurance on [their] own … will be getting a better deal”? Is paying $948 for something you don’t want better than paying $228 a month for something you want?

There you go again, President Pinocchio. Get that growing proboscis checked out. Use your “Cadillac” health-care plan.