Question for Jay Carney: Didn’t Obama lie when he told people, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan”? Update: Obama knew for at least three years
...All that’s missing is a perfunctory “let me be clear.” Carney’s reply to this is, essentially, (a) a lot of people will be able to keep their plan if they like it, even if it’s not quite everyone, and (b) those who are getting dropped from their plans will get more comprehensive coverage on the exchanges. The latter point is like having the CEO of DirecTV tell customers that their monthly bill is about to double but they’ll now receive an extra hundred channels in return, maybe one or two of which people will actually watch. Comprehensive coverage is lovely, but if you’re on a budget basic coverage might be more cost-effective; why pay $1,000 extra a year for a new package that includes substance-abuse treatment, say, if you don’t drink or do drugs? Obama took the option of cheaper catastrophic care away from people because insurers wanted to squeeze healthy middle-class suckers for extra revenue by forcing coverage on them that they don’t need. And yet Carney’s basically selling this as a *good* thing about the law, a sort of upgrade over the basic — but affordable! — plans people have now. Remind me again: Isn’t “affordability” supposed to be a key plank of the Affordable Care Act?

As to the first point, that a lot of people will be keeping their plans, it depends on how you define “a lot.” Sixteen million people being dropped and half of them being forced to pay more sounds like “a lot” too...

Brutal: The “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” compilation clip
...In the same piece, Jonathan Strong quotes Harry Reid as saying it’s true that you can keep your plan under ObamaCare because it’s not the feds who are canceling coverage, it’s the insurers themselves. (“Insurance companies cancel plans. That’s what they do.”) If you’re mad that the rug’s been pulled out from under you, take it up with Blue Cross or whoever. I’ve gotta say: Never did I think they’d be so cornered politically that Valerie Jarrett’s Orwellian defense of ObamaCare’s rules would catch on among Democrats more widely. But, per Reid, apparently it has. They really are seriously going to argue that the cancellations, many of which are compelled by ObamaCare’s new rules on “essential benefits” and disqualified grandfathered plans, are something that insurers are doing somewhat voluntarily, not because America’s new legal framework is driving them to do so. At today’s House hearing, Sandy Levin actually described the cancellation notices people are receiving as mere “transitions” onto the new health-insurance exchange. We’re about three weeks away from Democrats saying, “ObamaCare? What’s ‘ObamaCare’?”

For your homework, via Ace, go read this Patrick Brennan post at the Corner that explains how Obama’s own HHS deputies made the law even more aggressive than it was designed to be in terms of forcing plan cancellations. The math of covering preexisting conditions is such that insurers had little choice but to take certain actions, like raising people’s deductibles, that would disqualify them from “grandfather” status — and O’s team, by writing the regulations for disqualification broadly, compounded the problem. It didn’t have to be this bad. They wanted it that way.

Valerie Jarrett: Obamacare doesn’t force you off your plan; your insurance company does, by complying with Obamacare
...She leaves out the part where Obamacare legally requires all health insurance plans to include a certain number of benefits that was above and beyond what many more, ahem, affordable plans offered, thereby making certain plans illegal. Many of those plans were plans that people liked and were assured they could keep. Obamacare offered a “grandfathering” clause, which the administration later eviscerated after it had served its political purpose, ensuring even more people would lose their current coverage. So, no change is required by you under Obamacare unless your insurance company goes and changes your existing plan to comply with Obamacare....

...Even the most reliably hacky Obamacare supporters have at least conceded that people are losing their old plans because of Obamacare. They spin it with the notion that these new plans are way better, so why would you have liked that dumb old plan anyway (which fit within your family’s budget and served you well)? But the act of spinning requires at least some reckoning with the truth.

What level of denial and/or mendacity is necessary to tweet this? What confidence that the media will be there to cover your lies? This is the mindset of the people surrounding President Obama, and because no one’s ever held accountable for screwing up, this is the mindset of those who are “fixing” Obamacare’s problems....