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Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who Has the Prettiest Quagmire of Them All?

Politicians move their precious goalposts. That’s what they do, and so it is to be expected. But with the unveiling of HealthCare.gov, America has borne witness to an epic goalpost shift the likes of which we haven’t seen since those bygone days leading up to the second time America invaded Iraq. 

Before the U.S. government launched the bloody quagmire that was the Iraq war, Bush administration economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey took a guess at how much it would cost the country. Maybe a couple hundred billion dollars, after all of the long-term costs were taken into account, Lindsey said publicly. Then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld reacted with towering scorn, and Lindsey was fired for apostasy. The war couldn’t possibly be long enough or hard enough to run up those kinds of costs, Rumsfeld insisted. “It could last six days, six weeks,” he said. “I doubt six months.”

But, of course, it didn’t last six days, it lasted eight years, and it didn’t cost the nation a couple billion bucks, it has cost us $2 trillion and counting.

But never mind that. The politicians and pundits shifted the goalpost, and the war was deemed a big success because of the surge.

Political bullshit, however, is a bipartisan sport. And since Bush skulked out of power, the Democrats have leapt at the chance to take the field. In 2009, for example, representative John Dingell muted his disappointment with the Affordable Care Act. He had wanted to implement single-payer, he said, but the bill in the House was more than good enough for the moment:

First, it covers 96 percent of the people. Second, it creates an open and transparent process for people to buy and hold insurance. It sees to it that the abuses that exist in the insurance market, like pre-existing conditions, and rescissions are eliminated. It addresses a lot of Medicare problems while protecting Medicare. It closes the donut hole. It sees to it that people who do not have health insurance will get it almost immediately upon passing.

Four years later, isn’t this exactly what happened? Can 96 percent of the American public boast some health insurance? And didn’t the coverage happen almost immediately upon the measure’s implementation?—Wait. No?

Don’t hold your breath waiting for reporters to ask Dingell about the claims he made about the ACA. Don’t expect reporters to ask about similar claims made by people like, for example, president Barack Obama and health and human services secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who promised that the ACA would bring everyone into the pool — everyone, she said.

Instead, we now learn that the goal of the Department of Health and Human Services is to enroll seven million uninsured people in new health care plans through the state and federal exchanges by March. When a country with forty million uninsured individuals adds seven million people to the insurance rolls, does that mean 96 percent of the country has health insurance?

With the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, a nervous nation is bearing witness as our elected officials and their surrogates move this health care goalpost not a few feet to the right, but over to a different stadium in a different city on a different planet, and have the gall to declare their policy a precise, crisp field goal.

This “victory” is close enough for politics, perhaps, but what about journalism? Shouldn’t the country’s information gatherers be attempting to reveal the deep shamelessness of the American political class, instead of simply reflecting the image our politicians are trying to project back at them?