Is Obama Out Of The Loop, Ignorant, Or Lying To Us Again?

Obama on Obamacare in 4 Quotes President Obama’s press conference yesterday was a fascinating opportunity to observe the mindset of the person who is trying to forcibly reorganize a fifth of the nation’s economy. Four quotes stuck out as particularly revealing. 1. “What we're also discovering is that, you know, insurance is complicated to buy.” At 52 years of age, the President is finally learning what every adult American already knows. Health insurance is complicated to buy, with hundreds of factors affecting the price and availability of plans. It is alarming that the President is only now coming to grips with the complexity of the insurance industry that he made it his signature initiative to rearrange--operating on wildly naive assumptions about his ability to do that successfully and to predict the consequences, as should now be clear to everyone on both sides of the aisle. 2. “Another mistake that we made, I think, was underestimating the difficulties of people purchasing insurance online and shopping for a lot of options, with a lot of costs and a lot of different benefits and plans.” As anyone who has ever bought insurance knows, insurance companies want to know a lot of personal information before agreeing to cover your medical expenses, and buying a policy is not something Americans look forward to. That’s a big part of the reason millions of people are so frustrated that their plans have been cancelled due to the health care law. Many have a hard enough time understanding the details of their policies even once they have one. Yet apparently the President and the architects of the health care law believed the experience of shopping for insurance would be “the same way you’d shop for a plane ticket on Kayak or a TV on Amazon,” as President Obama put it on October 1. 3. “I don't think I'm stupid enough to go around saying ‘this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity,’ a week before the website opens if I thought that it wasn't going to work.” Taking the President at his word that he didn’t know about the tech failures raises a number of other serious questions. We know that senior officials were warned the website wasn’t ready, so why wasn’t the President informed? Who didn’t tell him? And why hasn’t he fired them? More importantly, if he wasn’t informed about the centerpiece of his signature policy initiative, what else isn’t he informed about? What doesn’t he know on Iran? Or Syria? Or North Korea? It is baffling that senior aides could keep such information from the President and still keep their jobs. 4. “I said that I would do everything we can to fix this problem [of policy cancellations], and today I'm offering an idea that will help do it.” To the millions of Americans who’ve had their insurance plans cancelled despite President Obama’s promises, yesterday the President offered “an idea.” Not a policy change. Not a proposed piece of legislation. Not language to change the rules. An idea--essentially a promise to insurers that the federal government would ignore the law and allow plans that Obamacare made illegal to continue to operate. Of course, he came up with this “idea” after the insurance companies had already cancelled hundreds of thousands of policies to comply with the law. As the Louisiana Insurance Commissioner--who serves as president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners--said in his response, “It is unclear how, as a practical matter, the changes proposed today by the President can be put into effect. In many states, cancellation notices have already gone out to policyholders and rates and plans have already been approved for 2014. Changing the rules through administrative action at this late date creates uncertainty and may not address the underlying issues.” At least one state insurance commissioner who is a Democrat, Mike Kreidler from Washington, has already said he won’t comply--which suggests that the President’s “idea” to keep his promise won’t get past the drawing board in most states, and he probably knows it--or maybe aides didn’t tell him that either. That was the stunning takeaway from yesterday’s press conference: he wasn’t informed, he didn’t fire anyone over it, he doesn’t understand how impossible a task it is to reorganize a whole industry, and he hasn’t learned much from the experience. Your Friend, Newt