#NCSEN: Is ObamaCare causing Senator Sock Puppet to unravel?

Since 2008, Kay Hagan has sung the praises of Barry Obama’s full-frontal assault on the American people and the health care industry.  She bragged about being on committees that helped write the bill.  She’s told us that we’ll grow to LOVE ObamaCare once we get to learn more about it.  Kay even PROMISED us that you could keep your doctor after ObamaCare got enacted. 

Well, the law got enacted.  Policies started getting cancelled.  Premiums sky-rocketed.  People started getting dropped by their doctors.  Employers cut back workers’ hours to control health benefit costs.  Hiring — already weak — slowed to a crawl.  Hagan — affectionately known in many quarters as NY senator Chuck Schumer’s Sock Puppet™ — has been trying to tell us that it’s not this horrible, ill-conceived, poorly-written piece of bureaucratic overreach that’s causing all of this trouble.  Apparently, it’s *the fault of those mean ol’ insurance companies (who, by the way, dump a lot of PAC money on her) selling “sub-standard” policies.*   That spin was too much even for perennial Democrat lapdog Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina – which trotted out a spokesman to call her out on it.

The video from her reelection campaign launch was hilarious.  It was great to see The N&O’s shih-tzu on camera following her out into the parking lot, after the event, firing off tough questions.  Perhaps the young man is finally allowing my professional counseling to sink into his cranium. 

If Kay is going to stick with this “Blue Cross screwed us over” spin, she needs to coordinate a little better with her press secretary:

[…] In her capacity as a member of the HELP Committee, Senator Hagan was involved with that committee’s markup of the health care reform bill in the summer of 2009.Once insurance companies began disingenuously offering plans that they knew they would be canceling it became clear that more people would be getting cancellation letters. That’s why Senator Hagan supports the Landrieu bill to allow people to stay on their current plans. Yes she read the bill.

UPDATE 3: After a little back and forth, Weiner clarifies below. The bolded section of the initial statement makes it sound like Hagan should have known “you can keep your plan” wasn’t true when insurance companies started offering the allegedly disingenuous plans.That was not what Weiner meant, she said:

Yeah I could have phrased that better. 

 

The full scope of the problem became clear only when cancellation letters started going out, since information on non-ACA compliant plans was not made public by the insurance companies. And remember – we are talking about this because insurance companies were disingenuously offering plans that they knew they would have to cancel, and Kay is supporting a bill to fix it.