If I may interject a note of reason as an outside observer:
Yes, the Republicans lie about the ACA, a lot.
It is however the case that the Democrats have lied about it too, and it’s time to accept that.
The OP is asking a pretty straightforward question. I say the answer is “no.”
No, no, no, no. If you have to explain in more than one sentence why “You can keep your insurance if you like it” wasn’t a lie, then it’s a lie. Same goes for anything else. When you tell someone something, it should be true with unspoken caveats.
“Promise broken”, not lie, but Obama has subsequently said that he meant that the dollar figure would be a reduction from the cost otherwise.
“Socialism”, “government takeover”, “disaster”, etc., are all lies – they’re all factually untrue. And they’re all more egregious than any Democratic lies. You can disagree, but this is a difference of opinion, as any judgment on “which lies are worse” would be.
This is pretty weak.
“Socialism” is a lie because the ACA has nothing to do with socialism. Some supporters could say that it’s “supposed to lead” to a communist takeover of Earth, but that wouldn’t make the ACA communism.
Socialism isn’t a lie, period. Many advocates of the law have said it will lead to socialized medicine, aka single payer. That also applies to government takeover.
As for whether or not it’s a disaster, if someone says that Ronald Reagan was a disaster as President, is that a lie? By your standard, yes. By any objective standard, it’s just an opinion about the overall impact of Reagan’s Presidency.
I was able to keep my insurance – so were the vast majority of Americans – so this wasn’t a lie.
If a politician says “I’m lowering your taxes”, and he lowers taxes for 99% of people, then it’s not really reasonable to say that he lied.
And it was true with unspoken caveats. If your insurance was ACA-compatible and if they choose to stay in the market you can keep it. True statement with unspoken caveats. Thank you for admitting that Obama told the truth.
If ACA is indeed designed to lead to socialism, then it’s pretty darn close. Policies designed to lead to socialist policies can fairly be characterized as socialism.
The “socialism” charge was a lie, period.
Who cares what “many advocates” (uncited) said? The ACA has nothing socialist in it, and it has nothing like a “government takeover”, so these charges are lies. Period.
I supported the Iraq war (at the time, which I now regret)… if I had said “The Iraq war will lead to an invasion of Canada”, then it’s still a lie to say “The Iraq war is about invading Canada”.
In other words, the voters didn’t read the fine print.
To be fair to the voters, the Democrats fumbled the ball on the ACA debate big time. They assumed the voters were too smart to believe the death panel and socialism bullshit. Republicans knew that if they made continuous charges at the bumper sticker level that they would carry the day in the court of public opinion. It’s hard to get someone to read the fine print when the opposition is putting their message out in 72 point fonts.
Let’s see a cite that the vast majority of Americans who wanted to keep their insurance as it was when they liked it were able to do so.
Pathetic.
Regards,
Shodan
I can’t cite stuff that would require reading minds (as to “who wanted to keep their insurance”), but here’s a cite that only a small minority had their insurance changed due to the ACA, that there’s no data beyond a few anecdotes about people losing access to their doctors, and far, far more gained insurance.
I’m outraged that you’re outraged! Anger and rage! Pathetic indeed!
I disagree with that. It’s true that the average person is not capable of figuring out anything as complex as the ACA. But the average person didn’t have to. There was an enormous amount of media coverage of the ACA, and the details were very widely disseminated, and anyone who wanted could have figured these things out.
No doubt there are details that have emerged since the law’s passage. But none of those are the lies we are discussing. These were all upfront. Of the ones that Gruber is discussing, the notion that the tax on high cost plans would ultimately be paid by the purchasers of insurance was universally assumed (part of the rationale for doing it was to discourage the purchase of expensive plans, and thereby to deter excessive utilization of healthcare services), and the idea that the ACA would increase spending was known and discussed upfront too. And so on for the rest of what’s being discussed here. Nobody had to rely on Obama’s assurances that if you like your plan you can keep your plan when the provisions in the law which made that impossible were widely known upfront. The only reason people believed Obama’s assurances (besides for self-deluded liberals dedicated to The Cause) is because they were so focused on things like Kim Kardashian’s butt that they couldn’t pay any closer attention to the ACA than an occasional sound-bite.
Gruber is right. The people are stupid. And the winner of political debates is whoever does a better job of appealing to their stupidity. Honesty in politics is a losing strategy and it’s not surprising that it’s so rare.
The slowing of the rate of spending increases is largely attributable to the recession, and to the extent that it’s not it’s unclear to what extent it has anything to do with the ACA.
Let’s analyze that for a second. So your view is that a statement like that about Reagan is merely an opinion, but if someone says that the ACA is “socialism”, that’s objectively factual because it will (factually) lead to socialism! 
Aside from the obvious absurdity of that position – since the ACA is about as far from single-payer as you can get and that’s why the insurance industry and their lobbyists supported it – every industrialized country on earth except the US has universal government-regulated health care that is effectively single-payer, and Canada has actual single-payer in each province. I don’t think any rational person would refer to any of those countries as “socialist” or on the road to “socialism”. The “socialism” label is a scaremongering, stupid label used by scaremongering Republicans – a second reason that’s it’s a deception: the ACA has nothing whatsoever to do with single-payer, and it wouldn’t be “socialism” if it did.
And finally, I see this whole kerfuffle cited in the OP as a non-issue. If the evil government was engaging in deception to pass the ACA for some nefarious purpose, what was the nefarious purpose? As far as I can tell the purpose of the ACA was to allow more people to have health care and to put a few limits on unethical insurance industry practices. All that Gruber seems to be saying is that the law’s proponents were underplaying the “tax” aspect of the penalty, mainly because so many Americans have such an aversion to the word, and because the penalty isn’t even relevant to anyone who carries health insurance, as every rational person should. Suggesting that the whole law was passed under some kind of false pretenses is absurd.
From your cite -
IOW Obama’s claim was a lie a couple of million times over. (Your claim that there was no evidence beyond a few anecdotes is, of course, a blatant misstatement of fact).
Yes, it is pathetic indeed. You have been lied to and systematically deceived, this has been made clear to you, and still you cling to it.
Gruber was right but he didn’t go far enough - the American voters who supported the ACA are not only so stupid they would fall for Obama’s lies, they will not even notice it when this is pointed out to them. Not everyone - Obamacare is unpopular with a clear majority of the US populace, and those who did notice turned out to vote the GOP into national and state level office - but support for Obama and Obamacare is apparently blind as well as stubborn. Obama voters seem to agree that “yes, we are too dumb to know what is good for us, and will blindly lick the boots of our betters, especially after they kick us”.
Not that this is news, of course, since it was established years ago.
Regards,
Shodan
If so, it was the truth far, far more times. He wasn’t lying to me (not that it really matters to me)!
This was a claim about people losing their doctors – if you have more data, please cite it.
What am I clinging to? Everyone’s a liar, including Obama. He’s a lying liar. So what? His policies are far, far better than the alternative.
Nope. ACA supporters just believe that the ACA is better than no ACA, and the statistics support this. I assume I’m always being lied to. I also believe that Obama lies less often and less severely than his opponents, which is supported by sites like Politifact.
The measure of a lie is whether it was true or not, and whether it was intended to mislead. Obama’s statement was categorical, made repeatedly. It was not an off the cuff remark. The fact that by percent most people were not in the group where this was not true does not mitigate the fact that it was a lie. You can qualify it and call it a “lie for a tiny percentage of Americans” but that is a weak defense, not an argument on whether it was a lie or not.
Other deflections trying to denigrate the quality of previous coverages to somehow imply Obama’s statement wasn’t a lie are even more weak. Obama lied. He’s not unique. The defense of the lie as not a lie or only a small lie, or a lie for your own good are poor.
Change “the” to “some” in “the Democrats” and “the Republicans,” and I agree.
Fair point–it’s not like Republican leaders picked up on it and ran with the torch. I mean, if the House Republican Leader had made “death panel”-ish allegations, you’d be wrong, but he didn’t, did he?