Had Obamacare been rolled out October 1 of last year, would President Obama have still been reelected? Considering his health care law’s negative impact on hundreds of thousands, in not millions, of voters in several key states, the answer is probably no.
Obama repeatedly claimed that people could keep their current coverage and that premiums would go down, not up, however, neither assertion was true. Even the media and several prominent liberals have finally conceded the point. Had Obamacare rolled out in October 2012, voters would have known the truth and potentially voted differently.
Obama got 332 electoral votes compared to challenger Mitt Romney’s 206—a difference of 126. Romney needed 270 electoral votes to win, 64 more than he received.
Had only four purple or red-leaning states that ultimately went for Obama—Florida, Ohio, Virginia and Iowa, a total of 66 electoral votes—voted for Romney instead, Obama would be a private citizen out on a speaking tour today.
The president won Florida by 74,309 votes, Virginia by 149,298 votes, Ohio by 166,214 votes and Iowa by 91,927 votes. It wouldn’t have taken much to flip those states, and the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of policies right before the presidential election could have tipped the balance
According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, Florida has 1.2 million people with individual (i.e., non-group) coverage—the policies most affected by Obamacare—Virginia and Ohio both have 500,000, and Iowa has 200,000. One Florida insurer is canceling 300,000 policies.
Had 50 or 60 percent of individual policyholders in those four states received cancelation notices — which is in line with government predictions — it might have changed the election results, and the course of history.
Many of us warned for years that Obamacare would force millions of Americans to lose their coverage, but the president kept claiming that if you liked your coverage you could keep it. Period.
The media never challenged him on the warnings because (1) if there is any group less knowledgeable about health insurance than the Democrats who wrote and passed Obamacare, it’s the media, and (2) they probably couldn’t hear the warnings because of all the pocket lint in their ears from being in the president’s back pocket.
Had Obamacare kicked in last year, there’s a good chance that dissatisfied voters would have given him and some of his Democratic co-conspirators the boot. Now that the public knows the truth, Democrats are getting increasingly, and justifiably, nervous about 2014. They know they could still pay a huge political price for their deceptions.