Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Greg Mankiw and Lisa Myers on the Tale About People Losing Their Health Insurance

Greg Mankiw lectures the advisors for President Obama on the latest controversy surrounding the Affordable Care Act:
As someone who has previously worked for a President, I am fascinated by how the White House staff let the President so consistently and so publicly make a false statement. Presidential speeches undergo a painstakingly thorough review process.
I’ll skip the obvious retort about how the President that Greg worked for told the American people a lot of lies and simply note that Greg’s source was Lisa Myers. Rather than getting into the specifics, let me turn this one over to Josh Marshall:
It's been a long time since I've seen someone bend over quite so far backwards to mislead people about what's contained in a story. But it is Lisa Myers. So I guess we shouldn't be surprised? We were just discussing this amongst our ed staff: it's true that the White House did oversell how little change there would be in the individual insurance market. But saying that millions of people are getting 'cancellation notices' or 'losing their coverage' is deeply misleading.

3 comments:

aidand said...

That Mankiw quote almost made my eyes pop out of my head like a cartoon. It's even worse than you say - not only did he work for George W. Bush, he also worked for Mitt Romney. And he has the balls to complain about dishonesty about the ACA.

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

It is my understanding that 2 million have now been told that they are being dumped from their old plans. This is a political disaster.

Apparently it was a reg put in place by HHS that is behind this. Did anybody notice that this new reg would bring about this result? Who vetted this? When did Obama realize that this reg would bring about this result? Some of the claims made by the critics seem to be off-base such as that Obama knew a long time ago since I gather this reg was put in place relatively recently, although in fact I have not seen when it was put in place. Is it possible at this point to simply repeal this idiotic and politically damaging reg?

ProGrowthLiberal said...

Jared Bernstein has a useful post on this which is featured over at Mark Thoma's blog.