Quoth President “Let me be clear” Obama:
The last thing I will say, though — let me say this about health care and the health care debate, because I think it also bears on a whole lot of other issues. If you look at the package that we’ve presented — and there’s some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example, we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your — if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.
Now, let me get this straight: “some provisions” just “snuck in there” (as opposed to being written and voted on by members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate), and those random “provisions” “might have” broken promises (and statements) that citizens would be able to…
- keep their existing insurance
- make decisions with their doctors without government interference
Which would imply that all those people who were saying that the health care bills, if passed, would eventually force people to give up their existing insurance and face government interference with private medical decisions — all those people who were called (and are still being called) “obstructionists”, “scaremongers”, “teabaggers”, and who knows what-all else — all those people were correct.
And President Obama’s administration was calling them liars.
So: allowing random legal provisions that violated previous pledges to magically come into existence; insisting that those legal provisions did not exist and that people who insisted they did were dupes or malevolent liars; berating people who voted against the reform bills because of thse provisions and then, in the same weekend, casually noting that well, yes, those provisions exist but are already being taken out (really? when? and by whom?)….
…that does bear on “a whole lot of other issues,” doesn’t it?