(Via AoSHQ) Well, whaddya know: the administration is trying to manage expectations.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius once described 7 million new Obamacare customers in the first year as what “success looks like.”
The White House is now trying to affix another label to the estimate: meaningless.
Fancy that.
Moe Lane
PS: My rebuttal to the title normally would involve instructing the (imaginary) Obamacare supporter to go give Samuel Johnson’s answer to Bishop Berkeley, only this is actually a rather horrible time to come down with a foot injury.
PPS: They ain’t gonna hit that seven million number. Just in case it wasn’t obvious already.
They are not going to even come close to righting the 5 million that lost their insurance
“You are not telling me the whole truth of why he came to Florida, are you son?”
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“I’m telling you the truth up to this point in the story. You ask for “the beginning’ and that is what I am doing.”
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“Very well, continue. But you better not be holding anything back or so help me I’ll snap you so quick, you’re going to wish you’d never left your mother’s womb, where it was warm, and safe, and wet.”
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“ok! I understand! You do not need to threaten me.
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“Then, last Saturday, my uncle did not show up for lunch.”
“We have to make you peasants eat this scat sandwich so you can find out what’s in it!”
They’re comparing it to President Barack Obama’s failed pledge that consumers can keep their insurance plans or doctors if they like them — another case of the administration having to answer for its rhetorical shorthand.
It’s not a “failed” pledge, it’s not “rhetorical shorthand” — it was deliberate bullcrap from the very beginning.
The most benign explanation of the Obama administration’s incompetence is that the people in charge are lawyers and bureaucrats who actually believe that the laws of nature and mathematics are as mutable and subject to nullification as the laws that humans devise, and that endlessly repeated rhetoric spoken by a glib con artist can become Truth. And the Dunning-Kruger Effect prevents them from learning how wrong they are until it’s too late … if they ever do.
I subscribe to a less benign explanation, but I do believe this was a factor.
7 million is out of the question but$5 billion sounds about right if you add the cost of the federal and state exchanges together.
They spiked the football in pregame warmups and now that the game it under way and they are getting their (backsides) handed to them, they want to switch to golf scoring.
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In other words, they might try to throw that 7 million figure away, but it will be used in campaign ads.