Accountability and Obamacare

It’s not surprising that President Barack Obama’s approval rating has plummeted to 39 percent, and it could easily continue to drop.

What we have here is some accountability coming home to roost. Well-deserved and overdue accountability.

The president repeatedly promised over the last few years that “if you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan, period.”

But now that turns out not to be the case. If you’re one of an estimated 3.5 million people who received insurance cancellation notices that were prompted by the implementation of Obamacare, you just might have an unfavorable view of the president these days. If you have had your hours curtailed or lost your job because your employer has been trying to avoid having 50 or more full-time employees, your regard for the president may be on the down side.

Obama also promised that you could keep your doctor, and we’ll see how that works out. Those forced onto the federal health-care exchange, if they can manage to access the website, may find that their doctors aren’t participating in the insurance plans offered by the exchange.

All of this is important in the sense that the American public was not correctly apprised of how the Affordable Care Act would affect them. Had they known, they may have voiced opposition to it, and maybe people who voted for Obama wouldn’t have done so. Instead, the administration’s sales pitch likely silenced plenty of people into thinking, “well, it won’t affect me,” with those same people going on to vote for President Obama, no matter how much they may regret that decision today.

Well, that’s water under the bridge. The election is a done deal. Nonetheless, the book on accountability is never closed, and the American people have a right to find out if they were misled. News reports suggest that advisers in the White House knew as far back as three years ago that millions of people in the individual insurance market would lose their plans, raising the question of what the president knew and when he knew it.

At the very least, he was very wrong in his promises, and he is paying the price politically as people are adversely affected by Obamacare one way or another. True enough, there will be people who benefit from the program as well, but politically, will their gratitude be a match for the scorn of people who are hurt by it?

Before he was elected, Obama said on the record that he favored a single-payer health-care system, and there has been widespread speculation that the Affordable Care Act was intended all along to be a temporary measure that would set the stage for nationalized health care.

If that’s the plan, it will depend on a majority of Americans having a lot of faith in a federal government that is botching Obamacare badly. It’s plain to see that faith in government is eroding, right along with Barack Obama’s credibility.

Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board.