RUTHFULLY YOURS

According to a recent Fox News poll, 50 percent of voters believe President Obama deliberately lied when he promised that people could keep the health care plans and doctors they preferred.

Still, Obama supporters such as House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) insist that no lie was told. Hoyer claims Obama’s words were accurate at the time the statement was made.

“You understand,” Hoyer said, “that if you had a policy on the day that this bill was adopted, you got to keep it … Now, you didn’t get to keep it if the insurance companies didn’t want to offer it to you.”

And so the debate rages on. Did Obama knowingly lie or was he himself uniformed about the subtle nuances of his own health care law?

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We no longer need to speculate. The plain facts should now be obvious even though people often miss the obvious.

If you let a lying man talk long enough, the truth usually comes out. President Obama’s own attempts at clarification reveal that he did indeed lie to the public.

In a recent speech at the St. Regis Hotel Washington D.C. Obama tried to clean up his mess by explaining what he meant to say when putting forth blanket promises.

“Now, if you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really like that plan, what we said was you could keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law was passed. So we wrote into the Affordable Care Act you’re grandfathered in on that plan.

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“But if the insurance company changes it, then what we’re saying is they’ve got to change it to a higher standard. They’ve got to make it better. They’ve got to improve the quality of the plan that they’re selling. That’s part of the promise that we made, too.  That’s why we went out of our way to make sure that the law allowed for grandfathering, but if we had allowed these old plans to be downgraded or sold to new enrollees once the law had already passed, then we would have broken an even more important promise — making sure that Americans gain access to health care that doesn’t leave them one illness away from financial ruin.”

This explanation is a far cry from Obama’s original promise. It was repeated many times including his speech on June 15, 2010.

“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.”

“No matter what?” Strange words inasmuch as his recent explanation says that there actually are a few “whats” and “matters” along the road. It matters when you got your insurance plan. It also matters if your insurance company made changes that conformed to Obama’s standards.

Most people don’t seem to be catching this but the moment President Obama explains the fine print of his promises, he is admitting that he had an accurate understanding of the law all along but simply chose not to speak the full truth.

The only other explanation would be that he himself was such an incompetent leader that he didn’t bother to read his own health care document. But if that is the case, then he is now attempting to cover up inexcusable ignorance by pretending he did know.

We are left with two choices: He lied then or he is lying now. Either way the man is a liar. His present explanation forces us to conclude that the original lie was in the original promise even though we learn this through a roundabout explanation rather than a stated confession.

Certainly this isn’t the first time our president has been caught telling a lie. We now know he had accurate information at his disposal when he claimed that the attack in Benghazi was a spontaneous reaction to a video rather than a coordinated act of terrorism.

There are others as well but perhaps it’s best not to focus on them.

Ironically Obama has benefited from too many lies and scandals taking place at one time. It makes the public grow numb to the plethora of accusations and increases (in the minds of some) the odds that Republicans might be making it all up.

So, one lie at a time. At the moment, the “lie du jour” is this: According to his own explanation, when President Obama said you could keep your health care plan and doctor, he was not speaking the truth. Which means he was lying.

This is Bob Siegel, making the obvious, obvious.

NBC News and Politico contributed to the news portion of this article.

Bob Siegel is a radio talk show host and columnist. Information about his radio show can be found at bobsiegel.net.