White House: ObamaCare? What’s ObamaCare?

November 20, 2013

What’s in a name?

If you’re President Obama, apparently a lot.

There’s been a subtle shift in the last couple of weeks to steer away from referring to the president’s healthcare law as “ObamaCare” in favor of the more benign (and misleading) Affordable Care Act.

As Politico’s Reid Epstein reports “the phrase is vanishing from official use.”

“White House website posts in July (“Obamacare in Three Words: Saving People Money”) and late September (“What Obamacare Means for You”) called the health care law the O-word. But now HealthCare.gov is almost entirely scrubbed of “Obamacare” and the law is called the Affordable Care Act in nearly every instance. Health insurance exchanges run by states don’t use the term Obamacare at all.”

But, as Epstein writes, it doesn’t just stop there.

“The president didn’t say ‘Obamacare’ once during his nearly hourlong news conference last week, while he referred to the “Affordable Care Act” a dozen times. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi went so far as to correct David Gregory on “Meet the Press” Sunday on the proper terminology. And White House talking points distributed to Democrats and obtained by POLITICO repeatedly refer to the Affordable Care Act in suggested sound bites, not Obamacare.”

You’ll recall it was barely a year ago that the president embraced “ObamaCare” in a speech in Iowa.

President Obama and his White House “message gurus” can try and rename this disaster over and over again.

They can call it “ObamaCare.” They can call it “the Affordable Care Act.” They can “chopped liver” for all we care.

They just can’t call it a good law.

No matter what spin they try and put on it. What’s they cannot change is this: ObamaCare is raising premiums, canceling people’s plans, and hurting Americans from coast to coast.