President Barack Obama attempted to backtrack on his ‘if you like your health insurance, you can keep it’ claims on Monday night, telling Affordable Care Act supporters that his administration had always been clear that you could keep your current plan only if it didn’t change after the ACA was passed.
The POTUS spoke in downtown Washington, D.C., attempting to soften his previous statements guaranteeing that people wouldn’t lose their current coverage after Obamacare went into effect — a promise that turned out to be untrue for many Americans. While campaigning for his healthcare law, Obama often punctuated his promise with a spoken ‘period,’ but that kind of definitive guarantee was gone on Monday.
Instead, the president tried to add caveats that weren’t present in his original statements.
“Now, if you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really like that plan, what we said was you could keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law was passed,” he told the audience. “So we wrote into the Affordable Care Act you’re grandfathered in on that plan.”
The president laid the blame on insurance companies, explaining to the crowd that plans and coverage were always changing. He pointed out that premiums increased or people were dropped from their plans even before the ACA.
“People are acting like this is some new phenomenon,” Obama said. “Every year there was churn in this individual market.”
He added that with Obamacare, insurance companies that want to alter plans must do so to meet a higher standard, therefore giving Americans better care. The POTUS did acknowledge that it might be scary to get a notice that your insurance was dropped, but he tried to spin it into a positive, saying health insurance reform was not just about helping the uninsured, but also the underinsured.
Obama also hinted at the often-repeated criticism that he had broken his promise of ‘if you like your health insurance, you can keep it.’ He told the audience that if his administration had allowed insurance companies to change their plans without meeting the standards put in place by Obamacare, they “would have broken an even more important promise: making sure that Americans gain access to health care that doesn’t leave them one illness away from financial ruin.”
The president reasserted his belief that his signature law would help all Americans, seemingly ignoring the fact that some people are unhappy that their insurance plans have been dropped under the ACA.
“So the bottom line is, is that we are making the insurance market better for everybody,” he said. “And that’s the right thing to do. That is the right thing to do.”
