A good idea, misleadingly sold

There’s no way around it: President Obama wasn’t being honest when he kept saying that if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it. He wasn’t just wrong; he knew he was wrong. He was overgeneralizing for the sake of the politics.

Yes, the reason people’s policies aren’t qualifying is that they’re kind of lousy policies. But that doesn’t get Obama off the hook for this. If the point was to eliminate cheap “train wreck” policies for healthy people who for whatever reason don’t have insurance through an employer, then its proponents should have said so and defended this on the merits.

Also not an excuse: the fact that the individual insurance market—where people are finding their policies being discontinued—is a small piece of the overall health-insurance pie. Its inadequacies are a big reason reform was needed; they’re also a big reason people with individual policies are worried about change. It’s not credible to dismiss all this as an outlier and suggest that Obamacare is actually about what it doesn’t do (overhaul the group insurance market) instead of what it does do (overhaul the individual insurance market).