More fraud and lies in Obamacare
I'm not a lawyer and I certainly don't play one here at American Thinker. But President Barack Obama (D) is a lawyer, or so he claims--his college transcripts, with his courses and grades from Columbia University and Harvard University Law School are under lock and key, forbidden to be gazed upon during his "most transparent administration ever." However, we do know he was president of the Harvard Law Review--very prestigious--and was a lecturer on Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago so he must be one. So why isn't he playing like a real one as president?
As the multiple failures of Obamacare emerged and he discovered that buying insurance is hard and complex, Obama airily decided he alone could suspend the law and make everything all better. Uh, no. Certainly he took a class on the Constitution and how it works. In high school.
And certainly, as a lawyer, as the so called "smartest man in the room," he should have known all his repeated promises and guarantees of the wonders of the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, constituted fraud. And more as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy explained.
McCarthy continues his exposure of Obama's lies--no, not "slightly misspoke" or an "incorrect promise" as the New York Times gently called them--but deliberate lies, "calculated deception," "brazen Lies," "fraudulent scheme" he writes at the National Review.
Obama's '5 Percent' Con Job
It's a 100 percent lie, according to the White House's own figures. (snip)The president claims he truly believed that people would be able to keep plans they liked because Obamacare provides for those plans to be "grandfathered" -- exempted from termination. Thus, he insists, he was acting in good faith when he made the promises that people could keep those plans, though he concedes the promises "ended up being inaccurate."
This is yet another calculated deception, a willful continuation of the fraudulent scheme. The president well knew that, in implementing the "grandfathering" provision, his administration wrote regulations so narrow that tens of millions of existing plans would be eliminated. Congressional Democrats knew this, too: When Republicans endeavored in 2010 to enact legislation that would have broadened the regulation into a meaningful safe harbor, Democrats closed ranks and voted down the proposal - including Democrats such as Senator Mary Landrieu, who now pretends to be a crusader in the cause of letting Americans keep their insurance.
Unable to deny that millions of Americans have lost the coverage he vowed they could keep, Obama and other Democrats are now peddling what we might call the "5 percent" con job. The president asserts that these victims, whom he feels so terribly about, nevertheless constitute a tiny, insignificant minority in the greater scheme of things ("scheme" is used advisedly). They are limited, he maintains, to consumers in the individual health-insurance market, as opposed to the vastly greater number of Americans who get insurance through their employers. According to Obama, these individual-market consumers whose policies are being canceled make up only 5 percent of all health-insurance consumers.
Even this 5 percent figure is a deception. As Avik Roy points out, the individual market actually accounts for 8 percent of health-insurance consumers. Obama can't help himself: He even minimizes his minimizations. So, if Obama were telling the truth in rationalizing that his broken promises affect only consumers in the individual-insurance market, we'd still be talking about up to 25 million Americans.
Wait, there's more! Yes, more lies!
Obama's claim that unwelcome cancellations are confined to the individual-insurance market is another brazen lie. In the weekend column, I link to the excellent work of Powerline's John Hinderaker, who has demonstrated that, for over three years, the Obama administration's internal estimates have shown that most Americans who are covered by "employer plans" will also lose their coverage under Obamacare. Mind you, 156 million Americans get health coverage through their jobs.
And more!
During all these years, while Obama was repeatedly assuring Americans, "If you like your health-insurance plan, you can keep your health-insurance plan," he actually expected as many as seven out of every ten Americans covered by employer plans to lose their coverage. For small business, he expected at least one out of every two Americans, or as many as four out of every five, to lose their coverage.
Read the whole thing. And then remember it for as McCarthy writes, "It gets worse."
He concludes:
Obamacare is a massive fraudulent scheme. A criminal investigation should be opened. Obviously, the Obama Justice Department will not do that, but the House of Representatives should commence hearings into the offenses that have been committed in the president's deception of the American people.
Is the House of Representatives up to doing its job? Will Constitutional Lawyer Obama's defense be "It depends on your definition of fraud?"
More lies to come.