Obama Lied - It's Just That Simple

“If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor – period.” – Barack Obama

“You f*cked up – you trusted us.” – Otter to Flounder (Animal House, 1978)

Obama Lied – It’s Just That Simple

Commentary by Sanford D. Horn
November 5, 2013

“If you like your private health care plan, you can keep it. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Period.” – Barack Obama; said loud and clear in dozens of speeches, pre and post-Election Day 2012

"No one will take it away – period.” – Obama, again

Liar, liar, pantalones en fuego!

Apparently "period," is never the end with Obama, as now he has introduced a caveat. “If you like your policy, you can keep it – if it hasn’t changed since the law passed – period,” is the new Obama mantra.

Obama can spin this like a dreidl at Chanukah all day long, but the fact is, he outright lied to the American people continuously. Let’s not sugarcoat it. He didn’t misspeak, he wasn’t confused, as left of center media outlets would claim in Obama’s feeble defense. He simply lied – period.

We the people don’t like your health plan, Mr. Obama – you keep it. In fact, if you think it’s so great why weren’t you the first to log on to your failed website and sign up for your proposed plan?

More like a scheme, not a plan, when the younger and healthier are being sacked with greater and greater costs to make up for the lower costs paid by older, less healthy folks. A failed website is the least of the problem, but it is indicative of the inability of the government to deliver a healthcare system remotely comparable to what the majority of the American people are receiving in their current plans.

But as the website is under current indictment, let’s kick it around before getting to the impoverished plan and Obama’s potential impeachment. A government that can’t successfully launch a website after a three year head start is demanding that we the people surrender our health, and by extension, our lives, to them.

Our health is not just the physical, but the mental, and if the Obama administration believes any clear thinking American is going to willingly, blithely forfeit its health care options to an incompetent government racing toward socialism, then they are simply nuts.

To listen to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius bloviate and tap dance around questions asked by the committee, dripping with arrogance is yet another sterling example of government’s overreaching into the lives of the American people. She claimed the system never crashed – define crash however you like, but several times during her testimony committee members showed how it was inoperable at that moment.

Both Obama and Sebelius have encouraged frustrated Americans unable to access the website to apply via telephone or paper formats, yet all roads still lead back to the not yet ready for prime time website.

A line of questioning regarding CGI, the Canadian company responsible for the website, unearthed the disconcerting fact that the same company will be tagged with fixing the problems for additional pay. Why should we the people pay this company for not doing the job correctly in the first place? The amount contracted for should be all they get and they should stay on the job until they complete it correctly.  And why couldn’t the Obama administration hire an American firm to do this job? Obama has outsourced jobs and is leading by example once again.

And further demonstrative of the paucity of leadership in this administration came when Sebelius used the childish response of “whatever” when she became flustered over a question of who is really in charge – Sebelius herself, or Obama – of this debacle.

“I’m as frustrated as anyone,” Sebelius said. Yeah, not so much, Madam Secretary – you are not using this system to sign up for Obamacare. The frustration exhibited by the American people comes in the form of those not able to sign up, which is few people in the first place who actually want to sign up, to those who are being unceremoniously dumped by their current insurers, which is numbering in the millions. As of November 4, 3.5 million Americans have already been dropped from their policies with no end in sight.

Obamacare will continue to have a deleterious effect on the economy as businesses large and small keep trimming staff and schedules turning America’s workforce into a part-time labor force. Additionally, the economy will suffer as people are now forced to spend more money for a lesser-quality insurance policy, as has been the testimony from far too many already. People from all walks of life and both sides of the aisle have testified that policy rates are increasing by hundreds of dollars per month and co-pays are doubling all with the promise of fewer options and higher deductibles.

Those who have received “Dear John/Jane” letters from their current insurance carriers are stunned, yet Obama and his cronies knew these letters were forthcoming as far back as 2010, as a recent “smoking gun” has been produced from inside the Obama White House detailing how millions of Americans would be cancelled. Obama has said to blame the insurers, yet why would they want to see their rolls diminished at a cost of millions of dollars?

That Obama knew, and as far back as 2010 – clearly in advance of the 2012 presidential election, smacks of a case of defrauding the American people. Such a fraud perpetrated against we the people should certainly be grounds for impeachment.

To be forced to purchase a product people may or may not want is tyrannical. For an administration so ardently supportive of a woman’s right to choose (i.e.: murder her unborn child), they’re rather restrictive about how we the people procure our health care.

Obama cavalierly and dispassionately expects people to just switch carriers or more importantly doctors as if swapping one brand of shampoo for another. Selecting a doctor is not an easy task and a very personal one at that. And after a many year relationship with a doctor to find it suddenly over can be unnerving and disconcerting, especially for older citizens. Do we the people really want government dictating how and where we procure our healthcare and doctors? Or from government’s chosen list?

It is not up to government to dictate to we the people. It is up to we the people to dictate to the government – a little thing called “consent of the governed,” as found in the Declaration of Independence. The time is now for we the people to stop offering tacit consent, and stand up to be heard.

The solution is not a government-controlled, mediocre health care plan with fewer choices, but an open market system where health insurers and providers compete across state lines for our business.

Less government, not more, is the answer. That also includes not providing “free” health care for illegal aliens. “Free,” of course, is never free, when once again, we the people are on the hook for the bills of the indigents. That spigot must be shut off and order restored.

We the people are speaking – while we still are able.

Sanford D. Horn is a writer and educator living in Westfield, IN.