WhatFinger

I'm sorry, perhaps he 'misspoke' or 'lacked clarity' - clearly he doesn't lie

ABC News: Obama lied again. Phone and mail signups aren't working either

By Robert Laurie ——--November 5, 2013

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Remember when, on the heels of the disastrous Obamacare rollout, President Obama appeared in the White House Rose Garden? Everyone seemed to think he was going to apologize to the American people for the big, steaming, pile of "fail" he'd just dropped on them, but that's just not his style. Instead, the whole thing turned into a cheerleading event. He found a couple of people who'd allegedly managed to enroll, they stood behind him, and he told us how wonderful the system was. The early implosion, he claimed, was just a glitch.
Sure, the website was a mess, but the President offered Americans another path to the quality, affordable, healthcare most of them already had. You could sign up by phone, he said, and the process would only take about a half hour. If that didn't work for you, there was always the good, old-fashioned post office. A snail mail application would still get the job done, whether Healthcare.gov was working or not. Then, President Infomercial's phone line crashed, while the paper applications have languished in the same, purgatorial limbo that has afflicted the website. Obama must be furious. After all, there was no way he could have known that the mail and phone methods were just as terrible as the website, right?
Actually, according to ABC News, he did know. ...and he knew at least 10 days before the October 21st Rose Garden pep rally. From ABC News:
A series of internal Obama administration memos obtained exclusively by ABC News reveal for the first time how dysfunction with Healthcare.gov has upended the entire Affordable Care Act enrollment process, including applications by paper and phone that officials have been pushing as more reliable alternatives. While President Obama and other top aides have publicly reassured frustrated customers that they can bypass the troubled website and apply by phone in as little as 25 minutes, those working most closely with the rollout acknowledged privately that even the non-electronic avenues would be no more efficient or guaranteed, the documents show. “The same portal is used to determine eligibility no matter how the application is submitted (paper, online),” reads a Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight memo from Oct. 11. “The paper applications allow people to feel like they are moving forward in the process and provides another option,” it says. “At the end of the day, we are all stuck in the same queue.”
The problem, of course, is that whether you go by phone or snail mail, the person on the other end of that correspondence is still being forced to go through the same, non-functional, signup process. So not only did the President lie when he said Obamacare would make things cheaper, he lied when he said the website would be ready, he lied when he said you'd be able to keep your insurance, he lied when he said you could keep your doctor, and we now know he even lied in his 1-800 number response to the ACA's train wreck launch. The White House is parsing this by claiming that applications and enrollment are two different things, despite the fact that - when they need to to inflate their numbers - they use the terms interchangeably. Apparently, this is all part of being the most transparent administration in history.

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Robert Laurie——

Robert Laurie’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain.com

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