And The Lie Of The Year Award Goes To This Line: ‘If You Like Your Plan…’

It comes as no surprise that President Obama’s claim: “If you like you plan, you can keep your plan” has earned the Lie of the Year Award for 2013 from PolitiFact.

Perhaps the most played montage not only in this year, but also in past years, shows the President repeating the promise that is showing no signs of coming true for millions of Americans who liked the medical plan they had, and are getting cancellations in the mail.

It is true that healthcare coverage is canceled by insurers all the time. However, President Obama looked the American people straight in the eye, as captured by video cameras multiple times, and repeated his line over and over again.

In the end, for the millions losing their insurance coverage, the lie of the year is indeed that, a lie.

The fact-checking website PolitiFact, puts out the Lie of the Year winner each year at this time, an honor most want to run away from.

Critics have questioned the methodology the website uses to fact-check, but nobody can deny the line has gone down as one of the biggest lies of the year, period.

The President started uttering the “lie of the year” in 2008 when he introduced his plans of reforming healthcare in the US. As the Presidential campaign moved forward, it seemed he repeated the phrase at any opportunity, and he continued to do so through the years.

Politifact says at the time, the phrase was a catchy pitch for what would become one of the most controversial pieces of legislation. But as facts began to shape what would become known as Obamacare, the President didn’t adjust his message.

The website states:

“It was a catchy political pitch and a chance to calm nerves about his dramatic and complicated plan to bring historic change to America’s health insurance system.”

Critics believe the promise was an impossibility from the get-go, and so the “lie of the year” came to be a reality for millions who have seen their plans canceled, many of whom are in the middle on cancer treatments or have pre-existing conditions.

After the embarrassing video showing the President repeating his promise over and over, and following the botched rollout of the Healthcare.gov launch, Obama apologized for misleading the American people, suggesting that the promise didn’t apply to “five percent of the population.” Moreover he stated:

“Now, if you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law, and you really liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.”

For these reasons, the site awarded the “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” statement as its “lie of the year” award winner for 2013.

In 2009 and again in 2012, the site rates Obama’s now infamous “lie of the year” statement a “Half True”, which means the statement is partially correct and partially wrong. An online poll conducted to gather readers opinion on the award showed that voters are in agreement with the final result.