In The News

Who believed President Obama when he swore that under the Democrats' health care overhaul, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan"?

No one should have.

The promises of ObamaCare have been empty, cynically made for political expediency with the understanding that the public has a short memory.

But this one lingers, as it should, because it was so obviously faithless the moment it was uttered.

Some politicians will say most anything to get elected or to pass legislation. Truth is optional.

And that is exactly the case with ObamaCare, which, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will push 7 million Americans off of their employer-based health plans by 2022. So much for the law's goal of introducing an era of universal coverage.

The 7 million figure, reported Tuesday, is a revision.

The CBO's previous estimate, released in August, was roughly half the size.

So where does it end? Will the next estimate double the current projection to 14 million?

It's a fair question. Roughly 55% of Americans are insured through their employers.

How many will lose the plans that they like due to government meddling in a system that was broken by government in the first place? Employer-based coverage as it has evolved from government policy isn't ideal.

But it beats what will be the grim alternative for many.

The White House and the congressional Democrats who voted for ObamaCare might act surprised by the CBO's finding.

It's unlikely, though, that they are. The ultimate goal of any health care reform coming from the left is a single-payer system run by the government. Squeezing people out of their plans through tax changes in the law that make providing insurance less attractive for employers is a feature, for the left, not a bug.

In the near future, those who lose their employer-based coverage can land in the government health care exchanges — which are unlikely to be open for enrollment this fall, as the law requires.

But who wants to lose the comfortable coverage of an employer to wind up in what shrewd observers are calling the government's health care version of the DMV?

Eventually, though, those who lose their plans will be cast into the single-payer government program with everyone else — if the Democrats have their way.

Promise made. Promise broken. Any others?

Of course.

Consider the president's pledge that ObamaCare would push the cost curve downward.

As we noted Wednesday, the CBO report says that spending on federal health care programs "is projected to grow rapidly when provisions of the Affordable Care Act are fully implemented by mid-decade."

"Unless the laws governing those programs are changed," says the CBO, "debt will rise sharply relative to GDP after 2023."

Also more expensive: The cost of subsidizing the exchanges has gone up 3% since the government's August estimate and now stands at $32 billion for the 2013-2022 period.

In January 2007, almost two years before he was elected, Obama proclaimed that "The time has come for universal health care." Then a U.S. senator from Illinois, Obama said he was "absolutely determined that by the end of the first term of the next president, we should have universal health care in this country."

The end of that term has passed and still the U.S. does not have universal coverage.

Nor is it on the brink.

Where it is is stuck with burdensome legislation that was hailed as a "big deal" by at least one empty head. A monstrosity that will cost more while providing less. A distraction and diversion away from market- and freedom-driven solutions that are both efficient and humane.

The country is saddled with a poorly thought-out law that has put it on a steeply declining path.

Will the nation ever recover?

It can. But it will require a full reversal from the road we're on.