Obama has claimed that he never said if you like your plan/doctor, you can keep it. “[W]hat we said was, you can keep (your plan) if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.”

That is a flat lie. Everybody knows it’s a lie. But PolitiFact, in calling it a “pants on fire” lie, has collected the statements that Obama actually made, here. I have decided to quote them all, so that if PolitiFact disappears the collection of evidence, it will remain here.

Obama’s comments before the law passed

• White House Web page: “Linda Douglass of the White House Office of Health Reform debunks the myth that reform will force you out of your current insurance plan or force you to change doctors. To the contrary, reform will expand your choices, not eliminate them. ” (Spanish-language version.)

• White House Web page: “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”

• President’s weekly address, June 6, 2009: “If you like the plan you have, you can keep it. If you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor, too. The only change you’ll see are falling costs as our reforms take hold.”

• Town hall in Green Bay, Wis., June 11, 2009: “No matter how we reform health care, I intend to keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you’ll be able to keep your doctor; if you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan.”

• Remarks at the American Medical Association, June 15, 2009: “I know that there are millions of Americans who are content with their health care coverage — they like their plan and, most importantly, they value their relationship with their doctor. They trust you. And that means that no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”

• Presidential press conference, June 23, 2009. “If you like your plan and you like your doctor, you won’t have to do a thing. You keep your plan. You keep your doctor.”

• Rose Garden remarks, July 15, 2009. “If you like your doctor or health care provider, you can keep them. If you like your health care plan, you can keep that too.”

• Remarks at a rally for New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, July 16, 2009: “if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctor, you like your plan — you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.”

• Presidential weekly address, July 18, 2009: “Michelle and I don’t want anyone telling us who our family’s doctor should be – and no one should decide that for you either. Under our proposals, if you like your doctor, you keep your doctor. If you like your current insurance, you keep that insurance. Period, end of story.”

• Rose Garden remarks, July 21, 2009: “If you like your current plan, you will be able to keep it. Let me repeat that: If you like your plan, you’ll be able to keep it.”

• Remarks in Shaker Heights, Ohio, July 23, 2009: “Reform will keep the government out of your health care decisions, giving you the option to keep your coverage if you’re happy with it.”

• Town hall in Raleigh, N.C., July 29, 2009: “I have been as clear as I can be. Under the reform I’ve proposed, if you like your doctor, you keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you keep your health care plan. These folks need to stop scaring everybody. Nobody is talking about you forcing … to change your plans.”

• Presidential weekly address, Aug. 8, 2009: “Under the reforms we seek, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”

• Town hall in Portsmouth, N.H., Aug. 11, 2009: “Under the reform we’re proposing, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”

• Town hall in Belgrade, Mont., Aug. 14, 2009: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. This is not some government takeover. If you like your doctor, you can keep seeing your doctor. This is important.”

• Presidential weekly address, Aug. 15, 2009: “No matter what you’ve heard, if you like your doctor or health care plan, you can keep it.”

• Town hall in Grand Junction, Colo., Aug. 15, 2009: “I just want to be completely clear about this. I keep on saying this but somehow folks aren’t listening — if you like your health care plan, you keep your health care plan. Nobody is going to force you to leave your health care plan. If you like your doctor, you keep seeing your doctor.”

• Remarks to Organizing for America, Aug. 20, 2009: “No matter what you’ve heard, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor under the reform proposals that we’ve put forward. If you like your private health insurance plan, you can keep it.”

• Presidential weekly address, Aug. 22, 2009: “Under the reform we seek, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your private health insurance plan, you can keep your plan. Period.”

• Remarks on health care reform, March 3, 2010: “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Because I can tell you that as the father of two young girls, I wouldn’t want any plan that interferes with the relationship between a family and their doctor.”

• Presidential weekly address, March 6, 2010: “What won’t change when this bill is signed is this: If you like the insurance plan you have now, you can keep it. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Because nothing should get in the way of the relationship between a family and their doctor.”

• Remarks in Glenside, Pa., March 8, 2010: “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”

• Remarks in St. Charles, Mo., March 10, 2010: ” If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”

• Remarks in St. Louis, Mo., March 10, 2010: “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. I’m the father of two young girls –- I don’t want anybody interfering between my family and their doctor.”

• Remarks in Strongsville, Ohio, March 15, 2010: “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. I don’t want to interfere with people’s relationships between them and their doctors.”

• Remarks in Fairfax, Va., March 19, 2010: “If you like your doctor, you’re going to be able to keep your doctor. If you like your plan, keep your plan. I don’t believe we should give government or the insurance companies more control over health care in America. I think it’s time to give you, the American people, more control over your health.”

Obama’s comments between the law’s signing and the release of the HHS regulations

• White House web page: “For those Americans who already have health insurance, the only changes you will see under the law are new benefits, better protections from insurance company abuses, and more value for every dollar you spend on health care. If you like your plan you can keep it and you don’t have to change a thing due to the health care law.”

• Remarks in Iowa City, Iowa, March 25, 2010: “You like your plan? You’ll be keeping your plan. No one is taking that away from you.”

• Remarks in Portland, Maine, April 1, 2010: The critics will “see that if Americans like their doctor, they will keep their doctor. And if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen in the future.”

• White House blog post by Stephanie Cutter, May 18, 2010: “A key point to remember is that while the Act makes many changes to the individual market, it specifically allows those who want to keep their current insurance to do so. Most of the Act’s protections apply only to new policies, allowing people to stick with their current plan if they prefer.”

After the release of the HHS regulations

• Kathleen Sebelius blog post, June 14, 2010: “The bottom line is that under the Affordable Care Act, if you like your doctor and plan, you can keep them.”

• White House blog post by Stephanie Cutter. “Another important step we’ve taken is to fulfill President Obama’s promise that ‘if you like your health plan, you can keep it.’ Last week, Secretary Sebelius and Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis announced a new rule that protects the ability of individuals and businesses to keep their current plan. It outlines conditions under which current plans can be ‘grandfathered’ into the system, minimizing market disruption and putting us all on the path toward the competitive, patient-centered market of the future.”

• Remarks on the Affordable Care Act Supreme Court ruling, June 28, 2012: “If you’re one of the more than 250 million Americans who already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance — this law will only make it more secure and more affordable.”

• Campaign event in Pittsburgh, July 6, 2012: “If you have health insurance, the only thing that changes for you is you’re more secure because insurance companies can’t drop you when you get sick.”

• Campaign event in Virginia Beach, Va., July 13, 2012: “If you already have health care, the only thing this bill does is make sure that it’s even more secure and insurance companies can’t jerk you around.”

• First presidential debate in Denver, Oct. 3, 2012: “If you’ve got health insurance, it doesn’t mean a government takeover. You keep your own insurance. You keep your own doctor. But it does say insurance companies can’t jerk you around.”

• Remarks in Largo, Md., Sept. 26, 2013: “Now, let’s start with the fact that even before the Affordable Care Act fully takes effect, about 85 percent of Americans already have health insurance — either through their job, or through Medicare, or through the individual market. So if you’re one of these folks, it’s reasonable that you might worry whether health care reform is going to create changes that are a problem for you — especially when you’re bombarded with all sorts of fear-mongering. So the first thing you need to know is this: If you already have health care, you don’t have to do anything.”

He lied and lied and lied and lied and lied.

And then lied some more.

And he’s still lying, about the previous lies.

But remember: Bush was the big liar because he, like everyone else on Earth, thought Saddam Hussein had WMD.

There are a lot of shoes still to drop on this ObamaCare thing. Commenter JVW sums up much of it nicely:

The first crisis of ObamaCare was the failure of the website rollout. The second is the cancellation of existing policies, regardless of the promises that Dear Leader made. The third will be the sticker shock come the enrollment deadline when practically everyone discovers they are paying more than expected. The fourth will be the completely predictable — except to the administration and its fan club — announcement that instead of reducing the deficit by the $250 billion over 10 years that they promised, ObamaCare is now forecasted to increase the deficit due to the expanded need for subsidies and the drag on economic growth. And the fifth crisis will be the full implementation of the cost control panels, which will impose British-style rationing of health care.

There’s at least one crisis missing from that summary: the crisis that will occur when people learn that their new and improved plans — you know, the ones with the higher premiums and deductibles — also have a smaller network of providers. Thus, after sticker shock, we will get access shock. “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” will be forgotten as people rage about an even more insidious lie: “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”

It’s non-stop bad news for months and months to come.

And, thanks to the defund effort, it will be indelibly seared into voters’ minds that the members of one party wanted to stop this so badly, they were willing to not-really-shut-down the government to make it happen.

The defund strategy got us bad poll results in the short term. I wonder if the decision to stand on principle will start to look smart, once voters realize just how bad ObamaCare really is.

P.S. Enjoy this video (start watching around 11:42) with Obama talking about the damned Republican scaremongering, and reassuring people that nothing will change in the individual market.

Thanks to Elephant Stone.

As I noted on October 28:

I have long said this: the plan is to demonize the insurance companies. When the companies raise rates, as they inevitably will and have already started to do, the natural Democrat response is: damn companies raising rates! Why, we need government to do something about it!

Yup. It’s starting:

The approach hasn’t sat well with some Democratic allies, who are publicly and privately urging the White House to ramp up its attacks on insurers, arguing that the the tactic shored up support as they struggled to push the bill through Congress. A group of Democratic strategists pressed senior administration officials during a conference call last week.

They’d like a repeat of 2009-10, when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called insurers “the villains,” Obama blasted their willingness to “bend the truth or break it,” and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius accused them of banking excessive profits.

“When Obamacare got into trouble, we juxtaposed our message against the insurance companies, which are very unpopular,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who has advised her 2014 clients, including Alaska Sen. Mark Begich, to go after insurers. “We should be messaging against the insurance companies this time as well. This is not good faith. If there is a snowstorm, the insurance companies are blaming it on Obamacare.”

The thing is, there is a way in which the companies are potentially at fault too, in part — but the insurance companies’ actions were completely enabled by the law, and were foreseeable by the people who wrote the law. I’ve been meaning to write about this for days. It’s a subtle point, and the Internet doesn’t do “subtle” very well, but it’s important to understand it, given the PR spin that is just around the corner. So let’s try discussing it, with an example using that classic favorite of economists: the widget. I’ll throw in doohickies for good measure.

Say a company sells widgets to one customer base, and doohickies to another. The government comes along and says everyone must have both. But, if you were buying only widgets in the past, or only doohickies in the past, the government will allow the company to continue to sell you only that product — under certain very limited conditions.

Mostly, the company will be happy about that. They get to sell more stuff! So the company might interpret the very limited conditions in such a way that “forces” them to sell unwanted products to people forced to buy them. While the company has an incentive to keep long-time loyal customers happy, it also has an arguably greater incentive to sell more stuff. (Especially if they’re being forced to sell loss leaders to more and more people, eating into their profits in other areas.)

So: is it possible that some of the companies cancelling policies these days are not necessarily legally forced to do so? I think it is. Does that mean it is all their fault and not the fault of people who wrote the ObamaCare law? Not hardly! ObamaCare is giving the companies a chance to make more money by forcing people to buy products. It’s in the companies’ nature to do that, and the authors of the law should have known that. Blaming the companies exclusively is like throwing a tasty antelope into the lion’s cage and then saying it’s not your fault if the lion eats it.

Nevertheless, you are going to start seeing a stream of media stories examining situations where policies were cancelled, showing how the regulations would have allowed the policy to continue, but the insurance company made the choice to cancel it. The fact that the insurance company was incentivized to do so will be utterly whitewashed. I can see it all like it’s happening in a crystal ball right in front of me. When it happens, I’ll come back and quote this paragraph, to show you how I predicted this utterly predictable turn of events.

The demonization of insurance companies is utterly predictable and it’s starting now. Watch for it to ramp up as ObamaCare inevitably continues to be a disaster over the next month and beyond. For example: there have been four, count ’em, four people enrolled in Delaware in the past month. This is a disaster of epic proportions in the making, and Obama will need one hell of a scapegoat. Get ready, insurers. It’s going to get very, very ugly for you.