The recent surfacing of videos exposing Obamacare adviser Jonathan Gruber’s boasts of deceiving the “stupid” American people to pass the president’s signature law has prompted some to take a closer look at other administration deceptions.
WND columnist Jack Cashill, in a piece written for American Thinker, recalled Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C. was widely reviled for shouting to the president during the 2009 State of the Union address, “You Lie!”
Cashill noted Obama had been insisting that nothing in his health-care bill would require people to change their coverage or doctor.
Wilson reacted when Obama declared his proposed law would not insure illegal aliens.
“Wilson had to feel vindicated this week when a report surfaced that 42 percent of new Medicaid signups were immigrants, legal and otherwise,” Cashill wrote.
Jim Geraghty at National Review joined in Cashill’s assessment in a commentary headlined “Joe Wilson’s ‘You Lie!’ wasn’t wrong. It was prescient.”
Geraghty noted the Obama statement that prompted Wilson’s outburst was: “There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false – the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.”
But last summer, Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell said she wanted Obamacare benefits for illegal immigrants, Geraghty pointed out.
Burwell said on a blog that illegal immigrants cannot be covered “and this is an issue that I think is more than a health care issue — it is an immigration issue.”
“And I think everyone probably knows that this administration feels incredibly strongly about the fact that we need to fix that,” she wrote. “We need to reform the system and make the changes that we need that will lead to benefits in everything from health care to economics to so many things – a very important step that we need to take as a nation.”
Geraghty’s conclusion: “Wilson wasn’t wrong. He was prescient.”
WND reported, Gruber apparently knew people would not be able to keep their plans and doctors, comparing people losing their insurance coverage to “falling off a building.”
In the first video that surfaced, Gruber said: “This [Obamacare] was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.”
He then blamed the results on the “stupidity of the American voter.”
“In this rare honest moment, Gruber put a lie not only to the basics of Obamacare, but also to the very foundation of the Obama presidency,” Cashill wrote.
Cashill cited the deception also used to obtain the votes for Obamacare from pro-life Democrats, who accepted Obama’s word that abortion would not be funded by the plan.
They learned, too late, that was not true.
But no one should have been surprised, Cashill wrote.
“During a debate with [Sen. John] McCain in 2008, Obama falsely claimed that because of a ‘pre-existing condition’ CIGNA refused to cover his mother’s cancer treatment. Even after this trumpery was exposed in the New York Times, he repeated it in a 2012 campaign ad.
“A man who was willing to lie about the death of his mother surely would have no trouble lying no voters about their health care plans,” he said.
Obama suggested that he barely knew Gruber, but a PBS interview shows Gruber revealing the president was in on the sessions where deception was discussed as a tool.
At Commentary Magazine, Peter Wehner wrote that Obama was “getting pathological.”
He cited Obama’s insistence that there was debate on Obamacare.
“Mr. Obama is confusing some things. The issue isn’t whether there was an extensive and tough debate. There was. The issue is whether the president and his White House, during that debate, intentionally misled us. He and they did, all the time, on all sorts of matters related to [Obamacare]. The conservative criticisms of the president were entirely on the mark. They were the truth-tellers; the president was not.”
Cashill also cited Obama’s claim to value “transparency and the rule of law.”
“This was pure smokescreen. Obama would package and sell his plan on more lies than Bernie Madoff sold his – and with more disastrous consequences.”
