There are important questions about whether the fix President Obama offered today for Americans whose insurance policies were cancelled will help them, whether it will hinder the broad goals of the health insurance reform law, and whether it will satisfy the opponents of reform. We will start to address them later on the editorial page.
But this was also one of those moments when a nation takes stock of its president. And it seemed worth noting here that Mr. Obama has dealt another blow to his own already damaged credibility with this latest reminder of how he and his team bungled the rollout of health care reform.
Hovering over the press conference at the White House today was the question of whether Mr. Obama lied — whether he deliberately said what he knew not to be true with the intention of deceiving people — when he said repeatedly that Americans who like their policies would be able to keep them.
"There is no doubt that the way I put that forward unequivocally ended up not being accurate," Mr. Obama said today.
He said he was thinking of the 95 percent of insured Americans who are covered by group insurance provided by employers, unions, Medicare or Medicaid. He also said he believed that a "grandfather clause" would cover those in the remaining 5 percent who wanted to hang onto current policies even if they were not as good as what is available on the new exchanges.
Those explanations are not likely to be terribly persuasive even to those who liked Mr. Obama and supported health care, but have come to doubt him. His political enemies will scoff at them.
I have seen no proof that Mr. Obama knew the details of the grandfather clause when he made his famous promise. But there had to be many, many people in his administration who did know the details. They could have, and should have, told the president that what he was saying was flat wrong – that the grandfather clause would not deliver on his broadly drawn promise.
In order to be covered, you had to have a policy that you bought before the law was signed in 2010 and was still in effect without significant changes at the end of 2013 — no major change in premiums, co-pays or coverage. How likely is that in the volatile world of individual health insurance, where policies last for a year and are subject to change at the whim of insurance companies?
On one level, it should surprise no one that a politician faced with either seeming like a liar or seeming like a fool would choose the fool. But that still leaves us with the disturbing impression — and not for the first time in this administration — that Mr. Obama sometimes shoots from the hip, that he is still struggling to handle the politics of the presidency after nearly five years in office, and that he is surrounded by people who are too incompetent or too weak to help him.
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Taking Note: Obama’s Health Care Promise
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