Kip Sullivan on “If you like your plan…”

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http://www.pnhp.org/news/2013/november/kip-sullivan-on-%E2%80%9Cif-you-like-your-plan%E2%80%A6%E2%80%9D

By Trudy Lieberman
Columbia Journalism Review, October 31, 2013

I have a question for all the reporters busy asking whether Obama misled Americans with his oft-repeated line that “if you like your health plan, you can keep it”: Where have you been? You should have challenged this claim well before now. You should have been reporting that some people in the individual insurance market might receive cancellation letters … well before it started happening to them…

That many of these folks have plans that would not meet ACA standards (typically, not enough coverage) was known all along. That, even with the Affordable Care Act, health insurance would continue to be unaffordable for some people—that, indeed, some would pay more than they do now—was known the day Obama signed the bill into law.

As Brendan Nyhan wrote yesterday for CJR, cancellation notices from insurance companies should come as no surprise—this outcome was anticipated by health policy experts both within and outside the administration. Unfortunately, most media coverage before this week did not explain how the process was likely to play out or hold the president accountable for making promises he could never keep.

http://www.cjr.org/the_second_opinion/reporting_too_little_too_late_on_obamas_you_can_keep_it.php?page=all

Too little, too late on ‘You can keep it’

Obama knew millions might be pushed off their health plans. The press should’ve known, too..."


Comment:

By Kip Sullivan

"As Trudy Lieberman noted in her article for Columbia Journalism Review, and as some noted as early as 2008 (1), it has been known for a long time that millions of Americans would not be able to keep their health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Yet President Obama and many other proponents of the ACA claimed this would not happen. They said people who liked their health insurance could keep it.

If Obama et al. had made this claim once or twice in the heat of a debate, few would be questioning their integrity now. But they made this claim repeatedly, both before and after the ACA was enacted. The chickens are coming home to roost. Obama and other Democrats are taking a terrible beating for having made a promise they knew or should have known they couldn’t keep.

What explains such irrational behavior?

In his essay for the Huffington Post, Richard Kirsch takes a stab at an answer. Kirsch is in an ideal position to give us one. He was present at the creation of the marketing strategy that was supposed to neutralize the inevitable attacks on the ACA from the right. Kirsch was the chairman of the “health policy refinement committee” of the Herndon Alliance, a coalition formed in 2005 to promote whatever it was the Democrats decided to put forward in the name of “health care reform,” and he later became the campaign director for Health Care for America Now, the leading organization in the fight to enact whatever it was the Democrats decided they could get through Congress..."