“If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” If that phrase sounds familiar, then there’s a reason for that: President Obama said it when promoting the Affordable Care Act.
A lot.
Of course, repeating your words doesn’t make them true, something that even left-wing PolitiFact had to acknowledge:
The Affordable Care Act tried to allow existing health plans to continue under a complicated process called “grandfathering,” which basically said insurance companies could keep selling plans if they followed certain rules.
The problem for insurers was that the Obamacare rules were strict. If the plans deviated even a little, they would lose their grandfathered status. In practice, that meant insurers canceled plans that didn’t meet new standards.
Obama’s team seemed to understand that likelihood. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced the grandfathering rules in June 2010 and acknowledged that some plans would go away. Yet Obama repeated “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it” when seeking re-election last year.
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Simply put, he lied. And judging from some of his recent comments, old habits are hard to break. While visiting Brazil last month, America’s forty third president had this to say about American gun laws:
Anybody can buy any weapon, any time, without much, if any, regulation. They can buy [guns] over the internet, they can buy machine guns.
As a former law professor, it’s hard to believe Obama doesn’t know that felons, drug addicts, and those with domestic violence convictions are legally prohibited from possessing a firearm. It’s true that guns can be purchased online, but they have to be shipped to a federally licensed gun dealer who must conduct a background check before turning it over to the customer. As for machine guns, the sale of new automatic weapons has been banned since 1986. If you’d like to pick up a used one, you’ll need to get fingerprinted, undergo a background check, register the weapon, and pay a $200 tax—and then wait about six months for approval. Now, Obama would be correct to point out that these laws aren’t always enforced. The problem with that?
He’s the one who didn’t enforce them.
A big chunk of murders are committed by people with prior felony convictions. But in the Obama years, only a tiny fraction were prosecuted when they attempted to buy a weapon. Thankfully, that's changing. The Trump administration is also strengthening Project Safe Neighborhoods, a program that takes armed felons off the street with long federal sentences. First tried in Richmond, VA under the name Project Exile, it caused the city’s murder rate to plummet.
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Brazil has some of the world's most restrictive gun laws, but they haven't kept it from having one of the highest murder rates. It's new president campaigned in part on a pledge to let citizens defend themselves. It's good to see that his supporters see through the lies about gun control. Hopefully Americans will too.
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