This ranks right up there with "If you like your plan you can keep your plan," although that one was merely intended to help us swallow it. This one was intended to get us to bite. One of the main purposes of Obamacare, we were told, was to get insurance coverage for all those people who didn't have it.
Never mind that many states had their own programs for allowing the uninsurable to get insurance. Texas, for example, has had one for several years. (I've wondered why it got so little attention. Maybe it's because they don't issue press releases, and reporters too busy Googling Kim Kardashian never learned about it.)
Anyway, all the clues are pointing to a miserably low number of uninsured people enrolling in Obamacare. The very people Obamacare proponents said they wanted to help don't want their help. We have to piece this together because Health and Human Services won't tell us how many of the uninsured they are insuring. Mary Katherine Hamm nails it in HHS: Why, no, we are not measuring the very metric ObamaCare was passed to improve. Excerpt:
The federal government is not even measuring the very number ObamaCare was created to bring down. How many times did we hear 47 million uninsured? How many times did we hear it was necessary to pass a huge revamp of the entire system to insure them? Later we heard the prediction for how many of those 47 million we’ll actually insure is quite underwhelming. Now, we ask: Hey, how many of the uninsured are we actually insuring?
A: “That’s not a data point we are really collecting in any sort of systematic way.”
There is no clearer dereliction of duty for this law. They created an irresponsible reform behemoth, they failed to implement it responsibly, they spent irresponsible amounts of money building a bunch of exchanges that don’t work, and now they’re not even responsible enough to bother checking how much help or damage they’ve done with the most straightforward metric available.
Helping the uninsured was something they hoped would happen. But it seems clear that the real goal was to place a vital industry under the government thumb.
Added: Yeah, calling it a "lie" was a little bit of hyperbole. But that's what the left did with George W. Bush when he relied on the available intelligence to contend Saddam Hussein had more weapons of mass destruction than were ultimately found. So we're playing by Alinsky's rules now.
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