Why Did Obama Lie About Health Care?

At this point, everyone understands that President Obama and his fellow Democrats (including most if not all of the Democratic Senators who are up for re-election next year) lied when they told us that if we like our health care plan, we can keep it. That was only one of a number of lies that were used to sell Obamacare: the average family will save $2,500 annually; if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, Obamacare will mitigate the budget deficit, and so on. But why? What was the end toward which this epic deception was the means?
At National Review, Andy McCarthy puts on his federal prosecutor hat. If Obama and his accomplices were in the private sector, they would be imprisoned for perpetrating a scheme to defraud. We are beginning to understand what the fraud was–the systematic pattern of lies–but what was the scheme? What was the point of the fraud?
Andy’s answer is one you have heard before: to “transition” the nation into a system of fully socialized medicine. But he makes a clear, brief and persuasive case, drawing on Obama’s own oft-stated political beliefs and the irresistible inferences that can be drawn from Obamacare’s structure, including, but not limited to, the fact that the law’s famous exchanges are intentionally designed to fail.

I would add this point: Obama and the Congressional Democrats knew that before long, their lies would be exposed. The Obama administration predicted in a regulatory filing in June 2010 that more than one-half of all employer-sponsored group plans would terminate by the end of 2013 (now pushed back by the administration to 2014). They obviously didn’t think that no one would notice. Likewise, most Democrats, let alone Republicans, can add and subtract. So as soon as Obamacare was fully implemented, people would see that health insurance under the new regime costs more, not less, than they had paid previously. (Actually, any fool would have seen this from the beginning if he paid attention.) The Democrats must have known that when their lies were exposed, the blowback would be severe, exactly as every Ponzi schemer knows the day will come when his pyramid collapses and he goes to jail.

The Democrats put off the day of reckoning by delaying the implementation of Obamacare by three years when they passed the law in 2010. They have bought more time since by postponing various aspects of the law–most recently yesterday, when they deferred the date for 2015 enrollment in the exchanges until after the midterm election. But still, these are only delaying tactics: the administration’s lies were destined to be exposed, and the consequences could only be severe. The Democrats did not run this risk in order to gain a small prize. It is reasonable to believe that the only goal that would have been deemed worth such an enormous political risk is the holy grail of statism: socialized medicine.