Barney Frank on the White House Rollout of Obamacare: “They just lied to people.”

Here’s
former House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank
(D-Mass.) on the administration’s terrible rollout of Obamacare
last year,
via Huffington Post: 

“The rollout was so bad, and I was appalled — I don’t
understand how the president could have sat there and not been
checking on that on a weekly basis,” Frank told HuffPost during a
July interview. “But frankly, he should never have said as much as
he did, that if you like your current health care plan, you can
keep it. That wasn’t true. And you shouldn’t lie to people. And
they just lied to people.”

Basically, yes (although
that wasn’t the only Obamacare-related thing the administration
misled the public about).

Frank suggests that the Obama administration could have avoided
some trouble by not making the promise. But the question is whether
the law would have passed without an explicit vow that people could
keep their plans and doctors.

White House officials debated that question and decided to make
the not-entirely-true promise anyway,
understanding that it was a bit of a fudge. They believed it
was necessary for the law to be passed. “If you like your plan, you
can probably keep it,” wouldn’t have helped sell the law, one
anonymous administration adviser
told The Wall Street Journal last year. 

That wasn’t the first time had looked into making
keep-your-plan-and-doctor health reform promises either. Roughly
two decades earlier, officials in the Clinton administration had
gone in the same rhetorical direction. But
a recently unearthed 1994 White House memo from the era found
one adviser warning about the problems that could arise from making
such an unkeepable promise. 

“It’s one thing to say we’ll preserve your option to pick the
doctor of your choice (recognizing that this will cost more), it’s
quite another to appear to promise the nation that everyone will
get to pick the doctor of his or her choice. And that’s exactly
what this line does. I am very worried about getting skewered for
over-promising here on something we know full well we won’t
deliver.”

In other words, it’s not clear if the law would have passed
without the promise. On the other hand, it’s probably the source of
some of the law’s public opinion struggles today. 

If you’re trying to understand why the law has consistently
struggled in the court of public opinion, this is almost certainly
part of the answer: The law that was passed isn’t the law that was
promised, and the public doesn’t like the difference and resents
being misled.