The Truth and Nothing But the Truth, Or, Least Half of It

I swear that the evidence that I shall give,  shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

Sworn Testimony Oath

There are no whole truths; all truths are half  truths.

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947),  Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead

Nothing  illustrates the slipperiness of truth  and evidence of half truths than President Obama’s repeated assertion “If you like  your health-care plan,  you can keep your health-care plan.  period.”

That is why today's news that the Obama administration knew half of employer health plans would be cancelled under the Employer Mandate is such a bombshell.

As it turns out, Obama's repeated vow  is a half-truth for half of the population.

According to Katie Pavlich,  in a yesterday Townhall article, “Health Insurance Losses to Get Worse: 51% to Lose Employer Based Insurance,”  more than half of Americans will be uninsured in 2015, when the employer mandate returns to ObamaCare.

Here is how she explains it:

In terms of the number of future uninsured Americans, we're look at more than half of those in the individual market losing their plans and at least half of those with employer based insurance losing their insurance, which leaves at the very least half of the currently insured population uninsured.

Administration officials knew this back in June 2010 when it was reported in the Federal Register that “midrange estimates are that 66% of small employers and 45% of large employers will relinquish their grandfather status by the end of 2013.”  This meant that more than half of 156 million Americans covered under their employer’s plans  would have health  plans cancelled.

Does this record and corroborative evidence from the Congressional Business Office indicate that President Obama was not telling the truth when he said repeatedly that Americans could keep their health plan if they liked it? 

Not necessarily.    Being a disengaged President, who only knows what is happening when he reads or hears it in  the news,  he may have been  unaware of these salient facts.  David Axelrod,  his former chief political advisor and still his explainer and defender in chief,  says the President  oversees a vast sprawling bureaucracy,  and he cannot possibly be  aware of everything that occurs under his watch.  From this vantage point,  President Obama  may be telling the truth and nothing but the half- truth.

The American public may not be buying the disengaged  argument.  The latest NBC/WSJ poll, jut out, reports President Obama’s approval  rating has dropped to an all time low of 42%.

And neither is Charles Krauthammer,  his most persistent and influential critic. 

 In “Obamacare Laid Bare, “ his column in yesterday’s Washington Post, Krauthammer acidly observes,” “The cancellations lay bare three pillars of Obamacare: a) mendacity; 2) paternalism; and c) subterfuge…Those letters are irrefutable evidence that President Obama’s repeated you-keep-your-coverage claim was false… So a law designed to cover the uninsured is now throwing far more people off their insurance than it can possibly be signing up on the nonfunctioning insurance exchanges.”


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