John Boehner, July 22, 2009:
Tonight we’ll hear the president likely say some — repeat some of the myths that he’s been repeating over the last several months.
First he’ll say, if you — if you like your plan, you can keep it. But, clearly, under the Congressional Budget Office estimates, 23 million Americans will be forced out of their private health insurance into a government-run plan.
And Lewin and Associates, a consulting firm, health care experts, estimate that number could be as high as 114 million.
Paul Ryan, speaking at the vice-presidential debate, October 11, 2012:
Look at all the string of broken promises. If you like your health care plan, you can keep it. Try telling that to the 20 million people who are projected to lose their health insurance if Obamacare goes through or the 7-point million — 7.4 million seniors who are going to lose it.
After finding these quotes, I looked to see if they were accurate. The answer appears to be . . . yes and no. 20 million is the high end of the range; the worst-case scenario. 12 million is the lower end of the range.
As many as 20 million Americans could lose their employer-provided coverage because of President Obama’s healthcare reform law, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in a new report Thursday.
The figure represents the worst-case scenario, CBO says, and the law could just as well increase the number of people with employer-based coverage by 3 million in 2019.
The best estimate, subject to a “tremendous amount of uncertainty,” is that about 3 million to 5 million fewer people will obtain coverage through their employer each year from 2019 through 2022.
Here’s the thing, though: these estimates are for losses of employer-provided coverage.
That’s the coming storm. That’s the effects of the employer mandate — the one Obama has already illegally delayed a year — not the individual market, which he is illegally and fecklessly pretending to “fix” administratively as we speak.
AN ASIDE ABOUT THE INCOMPETENCE OF POLITIFIACT: By the way — and this is so bad that I think it will merit a separate post and some hounding from me — PolitiFact repeatedly published an analysis that understated this by a factor of four. In a cut-and-paste that appears in three completely separate “fact-checking” pieces (maybe more) they said this:
CBO, along with the similarly nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, settled on a range of 3 million to 5 million fewer people, on net, obtaining coverage through their employer each year from 2019 through 2022 than would have been the case before the law was passed.
While 3 million to 5 million people is nothing to sneeze at, it’s also quite a bit lower than the 20 million figure Priebus cited. So where did the 20 million number come from?
Each year, doofuses. EACH YEAR.
Yes, 3 to 5 million is quite a bit lower than 20 million. But 3 to 5 million each year for four years is 12 to 20 million, which is not “quite a bit lower” than 20 million.
BACK TO THE MAIN POINT: Any way you slice it, there were predictions that this law would cause people to lose their plans. So yeah, we were warned. And you are still being warned — because the real crapstorm is still on the horizon.