There are 800,000 angry people in New Jersey. These are men and women whom President Obama reassured that, under ObamaCare, if they liked their insurance plans, they could keep them.
Now they’ve received cancellation notices confirming this isn’t true. They are hopping mad. So whom are state Democrats blaming for this false reassurance?
Hint: It’s not the man who made and broke the promise, President Obama.
It’s Chris Christie.
That was the bizarre claim advanced by Sen. Nia Gill (D-Montclair) at a state Senate Commerce Committee hearing. Apparently, Christie is to blame because he let Obama run his own health exchange instead of setting one up for New Jersey.
Gill also faulted the state’s banking and insurance commissioner for leaving it up to insurers to decide whether they will go back to selling plans that don’t meet the ObamaCare standards, as the president says could be done. The Christie team says the president’s proposal really isn’t a solution, and no insurance company in the state has taken the president up on the offer.
What makes all this passing of the political buck especially rich here is that back in 2010, Christie’s team wrote Obama warning the president his new law would mean lots of canceled health-insurance policies. But Obama refused to modify his policy, and went on making his phony promise.
We don’t blame Democrats for being scared. Eight hundred thousand angry blue-state voters is a scary thing. But trying to blame the failings of ObamaCare on the people who opposed ObamcaCare is going to widen rather than narrow the credibility gap.