As Byron York reports, 27 Democratic senators who supported Obamacare promised you that you could keep your health coverage.
Turns out, both of Montana’s senators made the list (surprise, surprise). Here’s what they had to say:
President Obama has taken a lot of heat for promising that if Americans liked the health coverage that they had before Obamacare, they would be able to keep it under the new law. But the president wasn’t the only Democrat in Washington who made that false promise. Many, many other Democratic officeholders said the same thing.
SEN. JON TESTER (D-Mont.): “‘If you like your coverage, you’ll be able to keep it,’ Tester said,
adding that if Medicare changes, it will only become stronger”. (“Tester In Baker To Discuss
Health Care,” The Fallon County Times, 11/20/09)SEN. MAX BAUCUS (D-Mont.): “That is why one of the central promises of health care reform has been and is: If you like what you have, you can keep it. That is critically important. If a person has a plan, and he or she likes it, he or she can keep it.” (Sen. Baucus, Congressional Record, S.7676, 9/29/10)
Meanwhile, Congressman Steve Daines (D-MT) calls the president’s recent move to delay the policy cancellations by one year simply a short term patch, as KPAX-TV reports:
Thursday’s announcement by President Barack Obama delaying the cancellation of millions of health plans that are not compliant with the Affordable Care Act drew quick criticism from U.S. Representative Steve Daines (R-MT), who called the move “a short-term, politically-driven patch” and vowed to continue fighting to repeal Obamacare.
Daines said on the House floor on Thursday, “Today’s announcement does very little to resolve the President’s broken promise or provide hard-working Montana families with much-needed relief and protection from the President’s failed health care law.”
And in Minnesota, the state’s Democratic Governor will not adopt the Obamacare ‘fix,’ as The Minnesota Post reports:
Gov. Mark Dayton, responding to health insurers’ concerns, said Monday afternoon that Minnesota would not adopt an optional fix for those whose coverage had changed because their plans didn’t comply with the federal health reform law.
Representatives from an industry group and the state’s major insurers met with the Commerce Department, which regulates insurance, on Friday to discuss their concerns over the administrative solution announced Thursday by President Obama.
How can he just ignore the ignoring of the law? (Imagine if a Republican Governor did this)
Here’s a must-read article that dives into the latest Obamacare “fix” a little deeper. Richard Epstein writes for The Hoover Institution:
The logistical difficulties that stand in the path of the implementation of this simple fix are serious. It’s not easy to close the floodgates after the water has raced downstream. The situation is made still worse because the President has vowed to veto this bill on the basis that, gasp, it lets insurance companies sell their “substandard” policies to new customers, who in his view should have their options limited solely to products offered for sale on the dysfunctional exchanges.
But the extraordinary claims for government domination over individual rights comes front and center when the President announces that he will protect the fundamental right to healthcare by barring ordinary folks from acquiring coverage in the voluntary market, in order to force them to seek coverage they don’t want—like treating maternity care for men as an essential minimum benefit—in a nonfunctional government market that serves none of their personal needs.
Even the most ardent defender of government power must concede that it is sickening when a president tells people without healthcare insurance that they must navigate his government websites or go without. If “the right to healthcare” is fundamental, Obamacare violates it. Delay here is no option. If left in place, every single structural problem that besets Obamacare today will continue to wreck innocent lives a year from now. Striking it down is an act of mercy for the American people.