Obamacare: The president says sorry

Was that supposed to be an apology? said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post. In an NBC TV interview, President Obama finally expressed public regret last week for all the many things wrong with his Obamacare rollout. “But is he sorry that he intentionally misled people? I must have missed that part.” When he was selling the Affordable Care Act to the public, Obama repeatedly insisted that everyone could keep their insurance if they liked it. But now that millions of Americans are losing health-care plans that they bought on the individual insurance market, the president could only manage to say, “I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me.” This “situation’’? Given that some people are now being told to pay hundreds more a month for insurance, Obama owed them something “heartfelt and sincere” instead of “Sorry about the mess.”

It’s true this was a classic nonapology apology, said Joan Walsh in Salon.com. But why should the president say he’s sorry for blowing up the individual insurance market? The truth is that this is a feature, not a bug, of Obamacare. Obama shouldn’t have “sugarcoated” that fact, but what the people clamoring for a better apology really want is to see the ACA fail and Obama humiliated. In reality, the individual market was “a horror show,” said Ezra Klein in -WashingtonPost.com, offering only cheap, bare-bones coverage for the healthy and inflicting punishing premiums on those with pre-existing conditions. The 5 percent of Americans who bought these policies often discovered that they had no coverage if they got really sick. The president shouldn’t have to issue a groveling apology for getting rid of such bogus insurance, since the switch to better policies will produce far more winners than losers.

Obama didn’t have to grovel, said Lynn Sweet in the Chicago Sun-Times. But it might have been nice to know he cared. Once again, the president’s remarkable “inability to sincerely express empathy” shone through. Millions of citizens have had their insurance canceled without warning, and feel justifiably angry and upset. And yet their president couldn’t summon a single moment of Clinton-esque warmth. Instead, he “bubble-wrapped” his apology by downplaying the plight of the losers, said John Dickerson in Slate.com. Obama was trying to apologize without taking responsibility. Someone needs to tell him “that’s not how apologies work.”

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