“If you like your health insurance, you can keep it,” President Barack Obama said in 2009 and 2010 as he advocated for the passage of health care reform.
That line is now being played over and over in the news media in light of evidence that Obama’s assurances may have been less than truthful.
According to CBS News, an estimated 2 million people will lose their current health insurance coverage for arguably better insurance policies they many not want, but any official number is still months away.
How can any branch of the government be trusted anymore?
According to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in October, public trust in the government is at a lowly 19 percent. It is certainly not the lowest percentage recorded – that was 11 percent, recorded in August 2011 – but it is also far from the highest. From the same poll, public distrust in the government is a resounding 80 percent.
The Affordable Care Act and Healthcare.gov debacle is just another thorn in the side of the government. It makes it hard to trust the government when promises are broken. Like in any relationship, trust is vital, and it is no different between the government and the people.
After Healthcare.gov was known to be far from operational, questions were raised by those in the media as to how many people were able to sign up the first day. The Obama administration sidestepped those questions, saying official data would be released sometime in November.
New documents obtained by The Washington Post revealed that as early as the morning of Oct. 2, officials knew only six people signed up for health insurance on the first day, even with 4.7 million people visiting the site.
“These appear to be notes, they do not include official enrollment statistics,” Joanne Peter, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said.
Regardless of whether they were notes or official enrollment numbers, the administration had a reportable number it could have given the media. Yes, it would have been embarrassing, but to lie that there was absolutely no information to report is cowardly.
It should not take months to provide data of at least online enrollees, as the Department of Health and Human Services continued to function during the government shutdown.
Enrollment numbers may seem like an innocuous thing to grill the government about, but it emphasizes the great lengths the administration is willing to go to control the flow of information and the message that information delivers. Touted as the most transparent administration ever, its actions say otherwise.
There are larger misdeeds emanating from the government that are far more dastardly. The National Security Agency and intelligence community have been caught in more than a few questionable lies.
Notably, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on March 2 that the NSA “does not wittingly” collect any type of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.
Clapper later said in interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that this was the “least untruthful” answer he could give. Thanks to Edward Snowden and his release of documents that are being disseminated worldwide through the media, we now know that Clapper lied before Congress about the mass collection of American’s electronic communications and data. While the NSA may not be directly listening in, they are collecting and storing the data, hence the need for their large data center in Utah.
The “least untruthful” answer is just one example of beautiful wordplay coming from the government.
In an interview by the Department of Defense, NSA Director General Keith Alexander attacked allegations that the NSA collected 70 million French phone calls saying, “If you did [analyze] 2 million French phone calls a day, listened to them, and tried to write them down, how many people would that take?”
Firstly, if the NSA is the surveillance superpower they say they are, it is highly doubtful NSA analysts are tapping into switchboards feverishly scrawling bits of conversation they are listening into.
Secondly, the NSA does not just interpret and translate information; they collect and store that data for other government agencies. The Internal Revenue Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation have both been given access to data the NSA has collected and stored before, what is stopping them from accessing the data again?
These lies, false promises and withholdings of information do not help the government win the trust of the people. We become suspicious of what they want and we, as a country, could become blind to an immediate threat or emergency that is truly urgent. It is a sad “boy cries wolf” example, and in the end, it could be tragic for everyone.
