It turns out that Ted Cruz’s sorry lament about having no health insurance due to Obamacare really was as preposterous as it sounded. Apparently the Texas Senator has no qualms about spinning tales on the spot if they mesh with any given political moment:
In a reversal from claims made on the campaign trail, Ted Cruz's presidential campaign is now saying the senator and his family do have health insurance and never lost coverage. The late night Friday revelation came more than 24 hours after Cruz had told a New Hampshire audience that he and his family were without health insurance and were scrambling to obtain new coverage--and used the claim to slam Obamacare for the mess he was in.
Cruz had told a New Hampshire audience just last week that he and his family:
- had lost their Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas PPO insurance policy at the end of December;
- that the ACA was the “cause” of their policy being cancelled;
- that he and his family are therefore no longer currently insured; and
- that the new policy which he’s (belatedly) decided to replace it with is going to cost 50 percent more than the old one.
It wouldn’t be surprising that a morally vacant opportunist like Cruz would lie, or that his deluded base voter supporters eagerly would swallow a lie. After all, this is the same Ted Cruz who claimed to the voters that that he financed his Senate campaign by liquidating all his property, neglecting to mention (to the FEC or anyone else) that he had received $750,000 in low-interest bank loans through his wife’s firm). A better question is why anyone outside the narrow confines of his campaign would take his claim seriously to begin with. As TPM's Josh Marshall points out, while Cruz is by all evidence an “odious weasel,” even Marshall did not take him, at least initially, for a habitual bald-faced liar:
[M]ainly because I would think that habitual lying would cause too much cognitive dissonance with his self-righteousness. But the new claim that he didn't know his family had health insurance, I'm sorry, that does not add up.
It doesn’t add up for several reasons, the most obvious of all being that for an Ivy-league educated Supreme Court-admitted attorney married to a managing director at Goldman Sachs, the idea that he was not cognizant of his health insurance status can only be indicative of one of two things—either Cruz, described ad nauseum by his colleagues as highly intelligent, is in reality utterly clueless, or he is in fact an opportunistic liar. The latter seems far, far more probable. More from Josh Marshall:
Apparently Ted just didn't realize his family had health insurance. Do you have health insurance? I bet a bunch of you are saying "yes" and "no" and "yes, but I'm afraid I'll lose it" or "yes, but it costs too much" or "yes, but Obamacare blows" and a million other things. But, "you know, Josh, not really sure if I have health insurance or not" is I bet something no one is saying.
Cruz’s campaign issued a statement reeking of “plausible deniability.” According to his spokeswoman, Cruz was told by his insurance broker that Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Texas was dropping his PPO coverage, but did not advise him that its HMO plans would continue to remain available and that his plan would transfer automatically to one. Blue Cross, however, confirms that they announced this move last July, which means he had six months to find a new plan. He also claimed that when he sought equivalent new insurance his premiums were being hiked by 50% (an impossibility in Texas, where the average premium increase has been 4%; he also claimed to a New Hampshire audience that this was occurring in their state—it is not) . Now his campaign explains this by saying, without any evidence, that the “new” insurance coverage he supposedly obtained was that much higher. So it appears what his campaign says he has done is basically to sign on to one of the most expensive plans possible.
Charles Gaba at Healthinsurance.org isn’t buying it either:
Remember, the man is a former State Solicitor and current U.S. Senator, running for President, with a large staff and well-funded campaign, and who has a major fixation on the Affordable Care Act. You’re gonna seriously tell me that he paid no attention to his own family’s insurance coverage situation? OK, then …
Gaba also notes that Cruz would have received an invoice for the new policy in December of last year, and wonders whether it is sitting under a pile of junk mail at the Cruz’s home. Even giving Cruz the benefit of the doubt on the 50% premium hike, Gaba has three concerns, none of which will ever be addressed by the Cruz campaign:
- I’d need to know exactly which BCBS PPO plan his family was on last year (and how much they were paying, including the deductible if any). Was it Platinum? Gold? Silver? Dental included? Etc.
- Second, I’d need to know exactly which Humana PPO they moved to instead. Is it truly a close equivalent? If the premium really is 50 percent higher, what about the deductible? Has that shrunk proportionately?
- Third: Even if the Humana PPO really is 50 percent higher … “apples to apples”… as noted above, he could also get a hefty discount on private policy coverage by using the DC SHOP exchange.
Cruz as a US Senator is still eligible for government employee subsidies for his insurance coverage up to 75%. He has turned this down. Finally, it bears mentioning the only reason he hasn’t stayed on his “blue chip” plan through his wife’s insurance from Goldman Sachs is that she voluntarily took unpaid leave to help on his campaign.
All in all, Ted Cruz is not --and never was—in any danger of losing his health insurance. Ultimately the question of whether he intentionally lied is beside the point. The fact is that he misled and fearmongered voters in New Hampshire regarding the impact of Obamacare on their health care costs and their ability to remain insured. Every inference from his phony story was a lie. He used himself as an example of what it must be like to be uninsured and all the fear and uncertainty that comes with that, when the truth is he had no realistic chance of being uninsured. And he reversed himself in a late Friday night news dump calculated to avoid any publicity.
No word on when he plans to apologize to the voters of New Hampshire.
See also Steven D’s post.