Guest Blogger: Doriangrey

When Barack Obama promised that “If you like your health insurance plan, you can keep your health insurance plan, period” he was lying, pretty much everyone with two functional brain cells knew that. He got a lot of help selling this lie from Democrat Congressperson and Democrat Senators, who, like Obama knew that what they were telling the American people was a flat out lie. One by one, these Democrat facilitators who propped up Obama’s lies, are turning on him. The cost of supporting his lies is reaching a level where the rats as they say are deserting the ship.

Sen. Gillibrand: “We all knew” that insurance plans were going to get cancelled

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s segment on ABC on Sunday just about perfectly encapsulates precisely why all of the feigned Democratic discomfort, disgruntlement, and even outrage pouring out over President Obama’s utterly shattered “if you like your plan, you can keep it” promise is so ludicrously disingenuous. As the Democrat from New York so aptly details, everybody involved always knew that lots of people losing their current insurance plans was not merely an accidental side feature but indeed a central premise of a functional ObamaCare rollout.

Barack Obama lied, every single Democrat who voted for and supported Obamacare knew that Obama was lying, and they cosigned his lie. It really is that simple. Now that those lies have come tumbling down far sooner than they expected, well they are scrambling to avoid paying the piper.

Flashback: Landrieu said she’d be 100% accountable for Obamacare’s outcomes

QUESTION: My question would be about accountability. Would you be willing to accept 100% responsibility, 100% accountability for the failure or success of whatever you vote for?”

MARY LANDRIEU: I do, already, because that’s what I do every election. I mean I, you all have to…when I run for reelection you say to me “Senator we like what you’ve done we voted for you, we don’t like what you’ve done we voted against you.”

Funny, Senator Landrieu is so 100 percent willing to be held accountable, so full of faith in Obamacare, that she herself has authored legislation to to gut Obamacare from the inside out. Yes, Senator Landrieu knew Obama’s promise was a lie.

Panic: Infighting starts as Obamacare supporters beg Dems not to go full Landrieu

But they’re so desperate to get on record as trying to help people out of the mess that is Obamacare that they’re willing to vote for any version of the bill they all roundly rejected in 2010, when it could have solved the problem. One option Democrat leadership might try to offer them:

Kaptur said that Democrats were also discussing with Simas what other vehicles could be used to let caucus members express their frustration without having to vote “yes” on Upton’s legislation. One likely option is a Democratic motion to recommit that would fail on the House floor but would at least put members on the record as supporting some sort of remedy for Americans who have lost their preferred insurance plans.

Costa, who said he was “seriously looking at” voting for the Upton bill, was unmoved by the option of a motion to recommit.

“I think an MTR means little,” he said. “The fact is, members want to be able to come back to their constituents and say, ‘I’ve tried to do everything I possibly can to allow you to keep your existing policies if that’s what you choose.’ I think it was said repeatedly in the caucus just a moment ago, it’s a matter of keeping one’s word.”

Sen. Tom Harkin may qualify for most clueless soundbite of the day, and that’s saying something:

Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Tom Harkin (D-IA) urged Democrats not to retreat from Obamacare because the “new value system” of making sure consumers are provided a basic standard of coverage is worth it. “To the extent that we start picking up on what Sen. Landrieu wants,” he said, “we never move to the new system.”

“We don’t want to continue those bad policies. People had policies that were good for them as long as they were healthy,” Harkin said. “It’s not even a short-term fix. It’s not the way to go. Let’s stick to what we’ve got. They’re fixing the website — people can still sign up with paper or phone … And it’s going to get even better. So I don’t see any problems.”

Ezra Klein begs for another suicide charge to save the law:

1. The Affordable Care Act’s political position has deteriorated dramatically over the last week. President Bill Clinton’s statement that the law should be reopened to ensure everyone who likes their health plans can keep them was a signal event. It gives congressional Democrats cover to begin breaking with the Obama administration…

4. The bill Landrieu is offering could really harm the law. It would mean millions of people who would’ve left the individual insurance market and gone to the exchanges will stay right where they are. Assuming those people skew younger, healthier, and richer — and they do — Obamacare’s premiums will rise. Meanwhile, many people who could’ve gotten better insurance on the exchanges will stay in bad plans that will leave them bankrupt when they get sick.
“I think it would be a real substantive mistake to do the Landrieu bill,” says MIT health economist Jon Gruber, a supporter of the Affordable Care Act.

5. Put simply, the Landrieu bill solves one of Obamacare’s political problems at the cost of worsening its most serious policy problem: Adverse selection. Right now, the difficulty of signing up is deterring all but the most grimly determined enrollees. The most determined enrollees are, by and large, sicker and older. So the Web site’s problems are leading to a sicker, older risk pool. Landrieu’s bill will lead to a sicker, older risk pool. Obamacare has provisions meant to stop an out-of-control death spiral, but higher premiums are a real danger. (For more on that, see “Seven reasons Obamacare isn’t facing a death spiral.”)

6. How much will premiums rise if Landrieu’s bill passes? No one knows. “It sure would be good to know how bad that problem is,” says Drew Altman, president of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. “I don’t feel I know.” Jon Gruber agrees. “I don’t know how much higher premiums go,” he sighs. “I really don’t.” I asked Landrieu’s office whether they had any estimates. “We expect the impact to be very minimal as this bill is designed as a transitional fix,” says a staffer.

Kay Hagan reaches for the panic button

We mentioned earlier this week how red state Democrat Senator Kay Hagan of North Carolina had watched as a previously slim but solid lead in the polls had evaporated of late. It seems that this was no momentary glitch in the numbers and the situation continues to deteriorate. The slide continued with what could only be described as a disastrous conference call with reporters, eager to pepper her with questions about her role in the development and launch of Obamacare, which even the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank saw as a ship taking on water.

Well, her problem begins with Obamacare, ends with Obamacare and has a whole lot of Obamacare in between.

Hagan hosted a conference call for reporters Tuesday morning to discuss the problems with the health-care law’s rollout, and the Q&A session was so painful that the senator should qualify for trauma coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

Hagan tried reciting some of the standard issue White House talking points to claw her way out of that one, but things only got worse when one of her spokeswomen followed up to try to clean up the mess. (From Big Government and the local paper the News & Record.)

“First, this is nothing more than a political stunt that does nothing to help more people get access to care and highlights the difference between Kay, who is working to fix this law, and her opponents who don’t have any plan to reform our broken health care system,” Hagan spokeswoman Sadie Weiner told the News and Record, a Greensboro, NC newspaper. “In her capacity as a member of the HELP Committee, Senator Hagan was involved with that committee’s markup of the health care reform bill in the summer of 2009.”

In the next sentence of the quote, Weiner states that her boss Hagan was aware of the fact that people would lose their healthcare plans under Obamacare some time ago.

“Once insurance companies began disingenuously offering plans that they knew they would be canceling it became clear that more people would be getting cancellation letters,” Weiner said.

Did you catch that one – two punch in those answers? Not only was her boss, Senator Hagan, an instrumental player in crafting the bill, but she was also aware that insurance companies were going to be cancelling policies as soon as it went into effect. It’s bad enough that the popularity of Obamacare in North Carolina is rapidly approaching that of a raging case of the crabs, but that sort of admission plants her firmly in the series of shifting denials and stories about precisely who knew what when.

It really doesn’t take a rocket scientist to be able to tell who was lying, and who is still lying, and who is afraid that they are going to be held accountable for attempting to foist off the worlds largest Ponzi scheme on the American People. Some of those Democrats, those that were the biggest most egregious liars are still spinning out the lies like their is no tomorrow, take Nancy Pelosi for example.

Pelosi: I’ve never met anyone who liked their insurance plan

Via John McCormack, you should watch all of this but at least skip to 4:50 for Pelosi’s part. What she thought she was accomplishing here, I have no idea. We’ve spent the past two weeks watching a Category Five political sh*tstorm descend on the White House, fueled by story after story in the media about people who are irate over having their coverage dropped. The problem’s severe enough that the president of the United States had to hold a presser yesterday at which he proposed a “fix” that’ll actually make his signature policy initiative less sustainable economically, just to stop Democratic incumbents in Congress from abandoning him entirely. And standing in the middle of all this is Pelosi, musing aloud that for all the angst among voters about mass cancellations, she personally has … never met a soul who liked their coverage. Not one. Which, she says, is why she herself never made the “if you like your plan” promise — a lie, as it turns out, per McCormack’s post. But see, this is why I grudgingly have more respect for her than for The One. She’s completely committed to the boondoggle she foisted on America, to the point where she’s willing to tell a room full of reporters with a straight face something that would have produced a good three or four days’ worth of “out of touch” coverage if a Republican had said it. She’s like DeNiro at the end of “Cape Fear,” staring at Nick Nolte as the water keeps rising. You might beat her but you’ll never break her.

Or

Pelosi: Of course I stand by my “we have to pass it so you can find out what’s in it” remark

If President Obama’s very clearly last-minute, politically desperate, and virtually unworkable faux-”fix” announced last Thursday wasn’t enough to get House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to strike a less defiant tone on her infamously idiotic “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it” remark back in 2010, then nothing ever will be, my friends — but kudos to David Gregory for at least asking, I suppose. Isn’t that whole “we have to pass it” mentality, he asks, and the subsequent big rush job to do so on which zero Republicans voted yes, kind of the whole problem behind this gigantic mess right now? And now as a result, the administration and Democrats are running around trying to deal with the consequences, many of which were foreseen by Republicans?

As a resident of California, this much I must confess to be true, every sick twisted insulting joke ever made about California or San Francisco in specific is a justifiable dig at California and especially San Francisco if for no other reason that it is San Francisco, California that forced Nancy Pelosi on America.

(Cross Posted @ The Wilderness of Mirrors)