O(bamaCare

 

Sebelius’ departure offers chance to discover origins of ‘if you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan’

By Dave Andrusko
Let’s pull together three separate items about President Obama and ObamaCare and see what picture emerges. Bear in mind we have falsely been told the last week and a half that after a disastrous roll out, all is well, and that ObamaCare may not be the anchor about the ankles of vulnerable Senate Democrats running for re-election everyone anticipated it would be.
#1. Let’s start with this, from my home state of Minnesota, which over the last decade has regularly elected pro-abortion Democrats to statewide offices. In a poll conducted for KSTP-TV, SurveyUSA found that President Obama’s approval numbers—55% in September 2009—are now down to 36%. Disapproval is up to 54%.
The numbers are worse for ObamaCare–33% Approve, 54% Disapprove –and worse yet for MnSure (Minnesota’s health insurance exchange) where approval stands at a miniscule 31%. Speaking of ObamaCare
#2. For all the President’s gloating about ObamaCare’s accomplishments, Gallup found “Americans’ views on the broader healthcare law remain more negative than positive.” It’s actually far worse than that innocuous-sounding conclusion: “Currently, 43% approve and 54% disapprove of the law, commonly known as ‘Obamacare.’”
#3. Kathleen Sebelius, as you know, resigned as Secretary of Health and Human Services, insisting the move was voluntary and not ordered from above. Referring to her appearance Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, TIME magazine wrote

“Former Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius called the rollout of the government’s healthcare reform law ‘terribly flawed’ and said the administration’s original predictions about its timetable were “flat-out wrong.’ … The former Secretary also said she didn’t think the White House oversold the program, but instead said that the problem of reforming health insurance was so thorny it defied easy solutions.”

Fox News went further.

“The federal site, HealthCare.gov, was supposed to be the primary place for people to buy private insurance under the 2010 health care law. But its first several weeks were an embarrassment for the administration and its allies.

“’I think there’s no question — and I’ve said this many times — that the launch of the website was terribly flawed and terribly difficult,’ Sebelius said.

“She also said the president setting a Dec. 1 deadline to have the website repaired was a nerve-racking experience.

“’Having failed once at the front of October, the first of December became a critical juncture,’ Sebelius said. ‘That was a pretty scary date. …

“’If I had a magic wand and could go back to mid-September and ask different questions based on what I know now,’ I would, she said. ‘I thought I was getting the best information from the best experts, but clearly that didn’t go well. … ‘ Could we have used more time and testing? You bet.’”

We have written dozens of posts about the botched roll-out and let’s just say Sebelius’ description doesn’t give you the slightest hint how arrogant and incompetent the Obama Administration was. Speaking of Sebelius’s replacement, Sylvia Burwell…
#3. With the aforementioned [dis]approval numbers for ObamaCare and the President, Senate Democrats have tried feverishly to change the subject. But as columnist Marc Thiessen wrote for the Washington Post, Burwell’s nomination to head HHS “thrusts Obamacare right back into the national spotlight — and with it Obama’s false promise that ‘if you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan.’”
Thiessen makes a very important point:

“The agency Burwell heads, the Office of Management and Budget, is responsible for the president’s budget. But OMB also has another, lesser-known responsibility: fact-checking presidential speeches. Every proposed presidential utterance is scrubbed for accuracy by OMB.

“When speechwriters finish a draft presidential address, it is circulated to the White House senior staff and top cabinet officials in what is known as the ‘staffing process.’ As part of that process, nonpartisan career policy experts at OMB review the speech and are responsible for attesting to the factual accuracy of everything the president says.

“So thanks to Burwell’s nomination, Americans may finally get to the bottom of how the biggest presidential lie in recent memory made it though OMB’s fact-checking process — not once but dozens of times,”

That series of falsehoods began as far back as June 15, 2009.
On Tuesday we’ll talk more about the perils (for Democrats) of ObamaCare.

Source:NRLC News