When a President repeatedly makes assertions that are obviously false, he has created a problem for himself that, to us, looks nearly unrecoverable. Breaking trust with a vast number of the American people while looking stupid doing so is a formula for disaster. As the Washington Post has reported, President Obama won’t stop repeating the same falsehood over and over again. Obama says:

“I keep on saying this but somehow folks aren’t listening: If you like your health-care plan, you keep your health-care plan. Nobody is going to force you to leave your health-care plan”

Obama’s statement might be true for the nanosecond after Obamacare becomes law, but at its heart is obviously and deeply untrue, as the President’s many endorsements of a single payer system have made clear.

As the AP reports about the public option in the House bills, “the Democrats’ option would force individuals from their private plans to a government-run plan, a claim that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office supports.” And even without a public option, as Powerline notes, companies could stop offering the plans that they do now, and the so-called “insurance exchanges” are under no obligation to match the benefits of anyone’s existing plan.

It is a very bad thing for the country to have a situation like this. The president’s polls are already in the tank. Not only does it bode ill in a political sense for the next three years, but one is forced to wonder about the psychological makeup of a man who keeps uttering such rubbish long after so many of the people have ceased to be fooled by it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 4:09 am and is filed under business, Democrats, General, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.