If Obama were CEO of BHO Insurance Company:
Suppose BHO Insurance Co. decides it wants to corner its state's market in automobile coverage. It begins an aggressive ad campaign offering a too-good-to-be-true deal: Sign up with us, and we'll give you better coverage at lower premiums. We're so sure you'll love our deal that if you like the terms of your existing policy, you'll be able to keep them--GUARANTEED!
The ad campaign, with the company's charismatic president acting as pitchman, is a smashing success. The competing companies lose so much business that they declare bankruptcy or are acquired by BHO. But BHO's policies are more expensive, and they include "comprehensive" coverage most customers neither need nor want. Take it or leave it, the company says, reneging on its guarantee in the knowledge that state law requires cars to be insured before they can be driven on public streets.
You'd call that a bait-and-switch. The legal term is fraud.
Perhaps the president-pitchman could escape criminal charges by claiming he was just a figurehead--that subordinates developed and executed the fraud without his knowledge. But certainly the company would face at least civil liability, and its president could be held responsible for negligence.
It seems to us that morally speaking, ObamaCare is the rough equivalent of our fictional scenario. The most salient difference is a way in which ObamaCare is worse than BHO Insurance Co.: The ObamaCare fraud was conducted irrespective of the volition of the "customers." Obama and his compatriots were able to carry out their scam merely by twisting arms in Congress's back rooms.
Legally, however, the two scenarios are entirely different. Whereas BHO Insurance Co.'s scam is against the law; ObamaCare is the law. Thus there is no evident legal recourse for those who were injured by Obama's fraudulent promise--for people like reader Kathleen Crowley, who writes:
My health-care policy was cancelled, and the Obama administration's explanation that policies are being cancelled because they were "substandard" and issued by "bad apple" insurers is absolutely not true. I had a very comprehensive policy, with a large and solid national health insurer, and the reasons my policy was not "ACA compliant" is because I now have to pay for maternity coverage, general pediatric coverage and pediatric dental coverage, as prescribed by ObamaCare. I'm 55 years old, have no children and don't plan to have children. Clearly, I am beyond childbearing age, and without children. Why would I have to purchase pediatric dental insurance? Or general pediatric care? ObamaCare is forcing people to purchase a product that they don't want and can't ever use. I do not need maternity or pediatric services but have to purchase them. The new policy that would have been "comparable" to my current policy is more expensive with higher deductibles. The president's comment of "shop around" is so smug. I sat on hold with an insurer while "shopping around" yesterday for over 20 minutes and finally gave up because I had work to do. I'll now have to factor quite a bit of time into my day to "shop around" since this president's dictates have resulted in my loss of health insurance I liked very much, and the market is now flooded with other people "shopping around." For the victims of governmental fraud, the only recourse is political, which is to say that it entails relying on the same government that perpetrated the fraud.
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