Obama Insincere Sales Pitch About Keeping Your Existing Health Insurance Will Hurt All Kinds Of Future Reforms

From Balance, "Bold Promises, Promises" by Tim Kane:

Reform is hard, and reformers have learned that making changes to existing law will often create winners and losers. So the modern approach is to "grandfather" the potential losers. Think of it as the "everyone gets a trophy" approach to fiscal policy. So when we talk about converting military pensions away from the coercive 20-year cliffed lifetime defined benefit and towards a 401k-style plan, the discussion cannot even begin without a commitment to honor the existing veterans. That’s how it should be.

Obama made this kind of no-loser commitment, and it was insincere. It was a sales pitch, not a policy description. And it probably will hurt future reform efforts of all kinds, notably the military pension overhaul. The administration’s own analysis after the law was passed and before it was implemented found that roughly half of policyholders would actually lose their coverage immediately. It’s rightfully a scandal. But it’s worse than that.