Dean Baker makes the case that Barack Obama did not lie when he said, "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." It's not a bad case and I wonder why it's taken so long for someone to make it. I don't completely buy it but it makes some good points. I mean, no one thought it was meant literally, as in "Nothing in the world will prevent your current doctor from being available to you." Doctors die, they retire, they relocate…I lost a great doctor once when my insurance company simply said they would no longer pay for him or any physician at the firm where he practices.
I did not take the Obama "promise" to mean my doctor would never change or that my private insurer couldn't cancel or change my policy. Maybe the president should have made that clear; that absent an actual government takeover of the Health Care system, private insurers and doctors were still going to do an awful lot of whatever they wanted to do.