House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) on Wednesday accused President Barack Obama of continuing to “mislead the American people about his health care law” by defending his promise that if consumers liked their health insurance plans, they could keep them.
“It’s beyond disappointing that, despite the evidence, the president continues to mislead the American people about his health care law,” Boehner said. “The president promised that if you like your health care plan, you can keep it. It wasn’t true when he said it years ago, and, as millions of Americans are finding out, it’s not true now.”
Obama qualified and defended the promise, delivered before and after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, at a health care address in Boston, Mass. Wednesday by calling his critics “grossly misleading.”
“For the vast majority of people who have health insurance that works, you can keep it,” he said. “For the fewer than 5 percent of Americans who buy insurance on your own, you will be getting a better deal. So anyone peddling the notion that insurers are canceling peoples’ plan without mentioning that almost all the insurers are encouraging people to join better plans with the same carrier and stronger benefits and stronger protections while others will be able to get better plans with new carriers through the marketplace, and that many will get new help to pay for these better plans and make them actually cheaper — if you leave that stuff out, you’re being grossly misleading, to say the least.”
In his statement, Boehner criticized Obama for promising what “simply wasn’t true.”
“All across the country, cancellation notices are hitting mailboxes because of the train wreck that is the president’s health care law,” he said. “Millions are being forced to buy new, Washington-approved plans, regardless of whether they liked their old plan or not and often at a higher cost. The President sold this law on a pack of lofty promises. But what he said simply wasn’t true. The American people deserve better.”
