It’s no longer novel to point out that President Obama sold Obamacare on a falsehoods, but it’s still worth pointing out.
Obama repeatedly claimed the fight to pass Obamacare was a fight against “the special interests.” Behind the scenes, he quietly reassured the special interests that this was empty populist bluster.
As the law has gone into effect, the emptiness of this populist bluster has become more obvious.
Big hospitals are getting bigger while small healthcare practices are going out of business. Drug-company lobbying is helping to kill more affordable insurance plans while enriching drug companies.
And insurers, who don’t like the price controls and many of the regulations of Obamacare, at least get protection from competition. That’s what Scott Gottlieb at AEI (where I am a visiting fellow) argued at an event today. AEI’s Natalie Scholl put it this way in a memo on the event:
Gottlieb’s article in Forbes spells out nicely the very complicated relationship between insurers and the Obama White House:
