If You Like it You Can Keep it

Lisa Myers and Helen Rappleye at NBC have broken a story confirming what many critics of the Affordable Care Act have been alleging for several years now: When President Obama assured us as recently as last year that if we liked our insurance we could keep it he knew that what he was saying was false.

Here's the lede of the NBC story:

President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.

Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”

Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “If you like your health plan, you'll be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance” even though he apparently knew that millions would not be able to keep their insurance. Here's the President in 2009 insisting in unambiguous terms that no one will have to give up their health care plans:

Despite these asseverations millions of people are losing their insurance under Obamacare or seeing their premiums rise astronomically. Some of their stories are included at the link.

Recently we've learned that when the President told us that the Benghazi raid was a response to an offensive video he knew that was false. When he told us that he didn't know that the NSA was spying on our allies' heads of state that was false, he evidently signed off on the directive to do it. When he told us that the White House had nothing to do with the IRS scandal, that was false. Now we're learning that even as he was doubling down on his promise that we'd be able to keep our current insurance if we so wished he knew that was false.

How long can the President of the United States blatantly and deliberately try to deceive the American people before the people's confidence in government is utterly destroyed? Can anybody trust anything that anyone in this administration says?

I'm reminded of the words of John Adams, our second President, who wrote that our system of government was created for a moral and religious people and is "wholly inadequate for any other." What happens when a nation so founded finds itself governed by people who feel no moral duty to tell us the truth?