Reince
Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, writes in a new
email that “Barack Obama knowingly and repeatedly lied to Americans.”
Priebus and other Republicans are piling on the President for saying
about the Affordable Care Act that “if you like your insurance plan you
can keep it,” in light of millions of Americans in the private-insurance
market (covering about 5 percent of us) now seeing their rates soar or
policies cancelled. What Priebus and other Republicans don’t say is that
even before the Act went into effect, individual insurance plans
typically had to be renewed annually, many were cancelled without
warning, and year-to-year rates were already soaring. The Act allows
insurers to continue offering their old plans, but many insurers are
choosing not to. In other words, the Act isn’t the culprit; the insurers
are. Obama is being skewered for failing to warn Americans what they
should already have known: that the market for private insurance is
totally unreliable. Which is why we needed the Affordable Care Act in
the first place (and why it would have been even better as a
single-payer add-on to Medicare and Social Security).
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