I don't think Liz Cheney, spawn of Darth Cheney, has much of a chance of making the Senate, but we really ought to keep her around somehow.
She's just so precious.
Liz Cheney hit President Barack Obama over the rollout of Obamacare, saying he lied that insurance policies wouldn’t be canceled and that he’s heading toward a single-payer system.
“It’s a strong word in politics to say somebody lied, but that’s absolutely what this president has done time and again, is lie to the American people and frankly hope he wouldn’t get caught,” Cheney said Wednesday on Fox News’s “Hannity.” […]
“I really believe this president, he’s the most radical man who’s inhabited the Oval Office,” Cheney said.
Setting aside the
radical, because hmm, and setting aside the secret plan to move to a single-payer system, because I
wish, Liz, this new maudlin concern over insurance companies discontinuing old policies seems a bit of a stretch even for the professional taffy-pullers of the conservative talk-show circuit. There are only two reasons an insurance policy would be "cancelled" by an insurance company as the Affordable Care Act takes effect. One, because the old policy was so tightfisted or otherwise borderline-crooked that it is no longer legal to sell the thing. Or two, because discontinuing insurance policies is what insurance companies do, all the time, and it has nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act and everything to do with a particular insurance company wanting to squeeze profits in particular ways.
Things may be different for others, but on the individual market I can't recall ever having an insurance policy for longer than a few years. We would dutifully pick one. We would pay the ever-increasing premiums for a few years. We would get a nice letter from our insurance company (coughBlueCrosscough) informing us that they are discontinuing that policy because reasons and that we were free to choose their new collection of policies, all notably more expensive than the last one. A cynic might surmise that this was an ongoing effort to dodge California rules about how much an insurance company is allowed to raise premiums on existing polices each year, since there's no rule about simply discontinuing those old policies and shuffling customers off into higher-margin plans. A cynic would be a damn smart fellow, in my book.
So the issue here seems to be either that we're pretending that the normal, jerkish behavior of insurance companies constantly canceling and reissuing polices is somehow the fault of President Barack Obama, or that we have a genuine, deep-seated outrage over insurance companies no longer being able to sell people scammy, near-useless policies because by God, insurance companies should have the right to scam whoever they want. Do I have that right?