"Obama himself acknowledged some people would lose their insurance during a health care speech Wednesday in Boston, though he also took aim at the “bad-apple insurers” who have been selling “cut-rate plans that don’t offer real financial protection in the event of a serious illness or an accident.”
“Now, if you had one of these substandard plans before the Affordable Care Act became law and you really liked that plan, you’re able to keep it. That’s what I said when I was running for office. That was part of the promise we made,” Obama said. “But ever since the law was passed, if insurers decided to downgrade or cancel these substandard plans, what we said under the law is you’ve got to replace them with quality, comprehensive coverage — because that, too, was a central premise of the Affordable Care Act from the very beginning.”"
Well, yes, you may have liked that plan, but you were too uniformed to know that you were getting a bad deal, that it didn't offer enough coverage in "the event of a serious illness," the plan was "substandard," and besides, it wasn't the same plan, because, whether you noticed or not, the plan was not the plan you thought you had. It had changed, not that you had changed it, but that the insurance company had changed it and so the deal was off, though of course, again, you were too obtuse to have noticed it. Indeed, canceling "substandard" plans on the technicality that the insurance company had thrown away the grandfathering privilege by making changes in the plan, is another promise of the plan. It was a promise you may not have noticed, but again that is your fault, you should have been better informed about the definitions of "your healthcare plan," since by changing any of the provisions of the plan your healthcare plan the insurance company, even though you were buying the insurance from the same company and the insurance had the same provisions and the same name and was as far as you knew was the same plan you had had before, was, in fact, the plan you were "renewing," the plan was not "your healthcare plan." Therefore, by causing it to be cancelled, the administration was not breaking its promise. It was not your healthcare plan in the first place.
You are so foolish and in need of guidance from the government that you not only need the government to tell you what should be in your healthcare plan, you need the government to tell you what is your healthcare plan. The government tells you that you can keep your car. Then, when you complain as the government tows your car out of your driveway and you come out yelling, "Wait, that's my car!" the government looks at you quizzically and says, "That's not your car. You put cheaper tires on it," or "but you switched out the bum alternator with a cheap foreign replacement," or "you banged up the bumper and had it tied back on with a coat hanger." You may think it is your car and were told that the new safety regulations for cars would not mean that you couldn't keep your car, but "your car" has a definition under the law that clearly, and for the purposes of the new safety regulations your car is no longer safe enough for you, regardless of what you may, in your ignorance, think. Your car is not, for the purposes of the law, "your car." And in any case, the government will see to it that you get a new car that meets the new safety standards and, since it will naturally cost substantially more and you will be required to buy the new car, may give you a subsidy to do so.
Of course, the government may have all kinds of good policy reasons for requiring the new car and for redefining the term "your car" in a way that means you cannot keep what you believe to be "your car." And all of the people that are trained in public policy knew that your car would not be "your car" for the purposes of the law.
Unfortunately, most Americans are not trained in public policy but do think they can understand basic English. They think they know what the phrase, "you can keep your car. Period," or "If you like your healthcare plan you can keep it. Period," means. They think that it means they can keep the car in their driveway, or the healthcare policy they have been renewing for the past few years. They don't like being told they can't keep it. More importantly they don't like being lied to. And the argument of all the people defending Obama that they were not lying but that the objects of their beneficence were too simple, too literal minded, to understand what "your healthcare plan," meant.
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