Throughout the 2016 campaign, there’s been quite a lot of anguish about how to cover Donald Trump. It was collectively decided that his dishonesty necessitated extraordinary measures to inform the public he was a yuge liar. CNN started calling him a liar regularly in the chryon underneath their reports, and Huffington Post has gone so far as to append an editors note attacking his credibility at the end of every story.
It’s true that Trump does stretch the truth, if not outright rewrite the facts, quite a bit. I don’t necessarily object to calling out egregious lies. But if we’re going to run around calling people liars, I have a modest proposal: Can we apply this standard to the President of the United States?
On Thursday, Obama uncorked this howler: “None of what they said has happened,” he said referring to Republican warnings about Obamacare.
Now in case you’ve been in a coma the past six years, Republicans said at the time of its passage that Obamacare would become the Hindenburg of public policy. They said it would be a disaster in many and various specific ways. And mostly, they’ve been right.
Running for reelection in 2012, Obama repeatedly promised, “If you like your health insurance, you can keep it” under Obamacare. Mitt Romney warned this was simply not true, and got attacked by media “fact checkers” for having the temerity to suggest that the president was brazenly lying. Obama got reelected, and millions of Americans were booted off their insurance plans by the law the next year.
Obama also said, “I will not sign a [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 the report “confirms everything critics and Republicans were saying about the faults of this bill.” The next year, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that, due to various technical issues, determining the cost “of the Affordable Care Act is not possible.” If Obamacare was saving money, you better believe the White House would find away to make that fact known.
But it can’t really be overstated how brazen a lie this was about deficits. Obamacare was written to be intentionally and specifically misleading on this point. Included in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act, a voluntary insurance program set up by the government to pay for adults who were unable to take care of themselves, either because of old age or disability. Of course, calling the program “voluntary” isn’t entirely accurate because the government required employers to deduct CLASS Act premiums from workers unless they specifically told their employer they wanted to opt out. The CLASS Act was further set up to collect premiums for the first five years of its existence before it paid out any benefits.
So when the Congressional Budget Office scored Obamacare and found that it saved money over its first decade of existence, over half the alleged savings from the health care bill—$53 billion—came from an insurance program that collected premiums for 10 years but only paid out benefits for for five. You don’t have to be a mathematician to see how this is deceptive.
Because Democrats knew that the CBO would measure the cost of the bill over the first decade, the CLASS Act was specifically designed to game the CBO’s methodology. The CBO did confirm that the CLASS Act would “add to budget deficits in future decades.” And Senate budget committee chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., even called the CLASS Act “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of.” In October of 2011, the Obama administration abruptly ceased implementing the program due to concerns it couldn’t be sustained fiscally, and it was formally repealed by Congress in 2013. But by then it had served its purpose—it was probably never intended to be implemented, but merely to provide a dishonest accounting narrative that Obamacare was deficit-neutral.
Obama also explicitly promised, to much Republican 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 representative Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” during President Obama’s address to Congress about the law in September 2009? Wilson’s outburst was in response to Obama’s claim 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.
And, in general, Republicans warned that the Obamacare exchanges weren’t stable and wouldn’t attract enough healthy and young consumers to keep costs down or the risk pools stable. In 2014, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would no longer report monthly enrollment numbers for Obamacare exchanges. If not enough people or the right demographic mix does sign up for Obamacare, the exchanges will bleed money and force a bailout of insurance companies on the backs of taxpayers. “HHS has lost their mind and will deserve every bit of criticism that they receive over [this decision],” said Charles Gaba of the nonpartisan ACASignUps.net. Again, if this data showed Obamacare was a success, they wouldn’t have stopped publicizing it. And on some level, deliberately withholding information that would open you up to criticism from the people you are politically accountable to is a form of dishonesty.
But you can only hide these failures for so long. After losing hundreds of millions of dollars in the law’s insurance exchanges, three of the top five largest insurers have announced they’re pulling out of Obamacare. Next year, large swaths of the country will have only one Obamacare plan available to them. Obamacare premiums are increasing nationwide an average of 22 percent, and some people have seen premiums more than double. Even the law’s most ardent supporters are conceding the exchanges are on the verge of collapse.
One big GOP prediction didn’t come true, however. It turns out that 30 million people have not lost employer health plans. However, a New York Times report earlier this year concluded 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 patented high-deductible, high-premium health plans. It turns out that, if anything, the GOP underestimated how poorly implemented and received the law would be.
I certainly don’t expect to turn on CNN and see a banner on the bottom of the screen that reads, “Barack Obama: Liar,” much less a report on how the GOP was right about Obamacare all along. But by the standards that are being applied to Donald Trump, calling out the president this way certainly wouldn’t be unwarranted.
