North Carolina Senator Kay Hagan is 1 of the 7 Democrats up for reelection in states that Mitt Romney carried, who are now in total panic mode amid the failed rollout and mass policy cancellations, because they ignored their constituents by supporting ObamaCare.
As so many other Democrats, including the president, she is finding herself adding new layers of new lies in her attempt to explain old lies. Team Hagan is taking a wholly unbelievable position. The senator and her staff claim she was sufficiently knowledgable regarding the behemoth of a law, claiming in an email, “Yes she read the bill.”
But Kay Hagan is also asking the people of North Carolina to believe that she only became aware of the law’s implications “when insurance companies began disingenuously offering plans that they knew they would be canceling.”
Unfortunately, the only choice for the people of North Carolina is to decide whether Senator Kay Hagan is lying about everything, or just lying about being sufficiently knowledgable about the bill when she decided to ignore her constituents and vote for ObamaCare. However, when the choice is between dishonesty and incompetence, everyone loses.
The statement provided by her office in an email is just simply not true, and sooner or later Kay Hagan and the Democratic Party will need to stop the lying charade. Insurance companies, as laid out in our PPD study, would not have legally been able to offer plans such as the plans Kay Hagan is scapegoating, unless they were grandfathered prior to the law’s passage. Even still, it was the Essential Health Benefit Standards written into regulations after the law’s passage by HHS that are responsible for Americans losing their health plans.
Republicans are taking aim at Kay Hagan over her ObamaCare blunders, with N.C. Speaker of the House Thom Tillis saying he wants the Greensboro Democrat to release audio from a conference call she held on November 13 with reporters.
Dana Milbank’s column in the Washington Post chronicled that call, and it wasn’t pretty.
“Hagan hosted a conference call for reporters Tuesday morning to discuss the problems with the health-care law’s rollout, and the Q&A session was so painful that the senator should qualify for trauma coverage under the Affordable Care Act,” Milbank wrote.
In addition to Tillis, Mark Harris, who is the Charlotte pastor also running in the Republican Senate primary, is asking Kay Hagan to answer 5 questions about her connection to ObamaCare:
- What was Kay Hagan’s role in crafting the language and provisions in the Obamacare legislation?
- When did Kay Hagan know that citizens would be booted from their healthcare plans?
- Why did Kay Hagan ignore the concerns of North Carolinians from 2009 until now?
- Did Kay Hagan actually read the Obamacare legislation before voting on it?
- Has Kay Hagan read the Obamacare legislation as of today?
The emails obtained from Hagan’s spokeswoman Sadie Weiner, appear to address some of the question asked by Harris. The first email read:
First, this is nothing more than a political stunt that does nothing to help more people get access to care and highlights the difference between Kay, who is working to fix this law, and her opponents who don’t have any plan to reform our broken health care system.
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.
In an attempt to reconcile how it is possible that she read the bill yet still broke her promise, Sadie Weiner responded with another inadequate comment that dishonestly ignores reality.
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.
Whether or not the insurance companies released specific plans that were non-ACA compliant, is irrelevant. If Kay Hagan had read the bill, or the regulations added every few months following the passage, then she would have known that individual paying policy holders could not keep their health plans. In fact, the unfortunate truth is that the law is predicated upon those people losing their plans, because they are needed in the high risk pool to keep premiums from going even higher than the already-unaffordable rates they are in the ObamaCare exchanges.
If Kay Hagan read the bill, then it would not have been “clear only when cancellation letters started going out,” as insurers are merely following the law, the law that she obviously did not read.
