President’s Revised Pitch, “If you like your plan, you can keep it if it hasn’t changed” rated “Pants-on-Fire” by Politifact

November 6th, 2013

This dishonesty is really, really troubling.

According to Obama, “What we said was you can keep (your plan) if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.”

But we found at least 37 times since Obama’s inauguration where he or a top administration official made a variation of the pledge that if you like your plan, you can keep it, and we never found an instance in which he offered the caveat that it only applies to plans that hadn’t changed after the law’s passage. And seven of those 37 cases came after the release of the HHS regulations that defined the “grandfathering” process, when the impact would be clear.

While Sebelius’ teleconference with reporters did provide that sort of caveat, in other instances, such as her blog post, she focused on the upside, not the downside. Her one mention of the extent to which grandfathered plans might be doomed strikes us as the equivalent of the fine print on a television commercial running in heavy rotation. Obama is ignoring the overwhelming majority of times he addressed the issue, where most people would have heard it. We rate his claim Pants on Fire.

As I argue in this Op-Ed, this was only one of three broken promises the President made. You can keep your policy, your taxes won’t go up, and you premiums will go down.