The mainstream media (and Republicans) are claiming that President Obama's well known statement that if you like your health insurance you can keep it, is a lie. Today Salon makes the case (and I think persuasively) that President Obama's statement is not in fact not a lie. According to the article in Salon:
The plans being terminated because they don’t meet the minimal standards were all plans that insurers introduced after the passage of the ACA. Insurers introduced these plans knowing that they would not meet the standards that would come into effect in 2014. Insurers may not have informed their clients at the time they sold these plans that they would not be available after 2014 because they had designed a plan that did not comply with the ACA.
However if the insurers didn’t tell their clients that the new plans would only be available for a short period of time, the blame would seem to rest with the insurance companies, not the ACA. After all, President Obama did not promise people that he would keep insurers from developing new plans that will not comply with the provisions of the ACA.
http://www.salon.com/...
(bold emphasis mine.) Why do we not hear the Democrats saying this? Why are we allowing the Republicans to frame the issue?
It seems to me that rather than conceding the point (as the Administration and the Democratic Party seem to have done), Democrats should be arguing that the plans being canceled are new plans. And these new insurance plans are substandard plans that were sold to people for more money in order to maximize the insurance company's profits before the Affordable Care Act came into effect.