President Obama’s “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” promise was yesterday declared the “lie of the year” by Politifact.
It was a catchy political pitch and a chance to calm nerves about his dramatic and complicated plan to bring historic change to America’s health insurance system.”If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” President Barack Obama said — many times — of his landmark new law.But the promise was impossible to keep.So this fall, as cancellation letters were going out to approximately 4 million Americans, the public realized Obama’s breezy assurances were wrong.Boiling down the complicated health care law to a soundbite proved treacherous, even for its promoter-in-chief. Obama and his team made matters worse, suggesting they had been misunderstood all along. The stunning political uproar led to this: a rare presidential apology.For all of these reasons, PolitiFact has named “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” the Lie of the Year for 2013. Readers in a separate online poll overwhelmingly agreed with the choice.
While it’s great to see Politifact acknowledging what many others have warned about for quite some time, it wasn’t always as critical of the same or similar claims. Lachlan Markay pointed this out:
That’s been one of the challenges with Politifact: sometimes it gets things right, sometimes not so much. And eventually they got this one right, but it was an interesting path in finally getting there.
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