Throughout the 2016 campaign, it seemed to be the consensus view in the media that Donald Trump is a uniquely dishonest creature, obliging the selfsame media to take extraordinary steps, such as explicitly calling him a liar in news stories. The Scrapbook has no problem with calling liars liars, but the media’s conceit of Trump’s uniqueness when it comes to brazen dishonesty in politics is laughable.
Exhibit A is the presidency of Barack Obama. Most recently, Obama uncorked this howler, referring to voluminous Republican warnings about Obamacare: “None of what they said has happened.”
Oh really? Obama repeatedly promised, “If you like your health insurance, you can keep it.” He got reelected in spite of Mitt Romney warning this simply was not true, and the next year, some 8 million Americans were booted off their insurance plans by the law. (Even PolitiFact made this its “Lie of the Year” in 2013.)
Obama also said, “I will not sign a [health care] plan that adds one dime to our deficits.” But a Government
Accountability Office report in 2013 found the law was going to add $6.2 trillion to the deficit over the next 75 years, prompting GOP senator Jeff Sessions to remark that the report “confirms everything critics and Republicans were saying about the faults of this bill.”
Obama also explicitly promised, to much scoffing, that family insurance premiums would go down $2,500 on average as a result of the law. As of last year, employer-sponsored health insurance premiums have risen twice as fast as wages; deductibles have risen almost seven times as fast. Premiums are up on average nearly $5,000.
Oh, and remember how angry Democrats were when South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” during President Obama’s speech about health care reform in September 2009? Wilson’s outburst came in response to Obama’s assertion that the law would not provide insurance to illegal immigrants. Earlier this year, a report for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee found the government had handed out $750 million in Obamacare subsidies to people unable to verify their citizenship.
Republicans further warned that the Obamacare exchanges weren’t stable and wouldn’t attract enough healthy and young consumers to keep costs down or risk pools stable. Well, in the past month we’ve learned that they were right again. Insurers are abandoning the system in droves, and large swaths of the country will have only one Obamacare plan available to them next year. Obamacare premiums are increasing nationwide an average of 22 percent, and some people have seen premiums more than double.
To be fair, one big GOP prediction didn’t come true. It turns out 30 million people have not lost employer health plans. But the New York Times reported earlier this year that this is because employers quickly figured out “desirable employees still expect health benefits.” In other words, no one wants a job that forces them to sign up for one of Obamacare’s double whammy high-deductible, high-premium plans. If anything, the GOP underestimated how poorly implemented and received the law would be.
But don’t expect the media to take any extraordinary measures to inform the public of Obama’s pattern of politically motivated falsehoods, much less explicitly vindicate his GOP critics.
