(via @amandacarpenter) Let us walk through a test case on the administration’s claimed insurance support for small business owners.

• Zach owns a small business (24 employees, average salary $35K) and provides them with health care ($79.2K/year).
• He has already seen a 15% increase in health care costs this year, so he is quite keen to hear about insurance relief.
• The White House’s PR flunkies were bragging about a program that gives ‘broad eligibility’ to companies with less than 25 employees and average salaries below $50K.
• Zach is covered both ways!  Bring on that insurance relief!
• …Oh.  If you have more than 10 employees and average salaries above $20K… well.  The answer is, no, at Zach’s level he’s not getting insurance relief.
• And here’s the important thing: he was actually told otherwise by the White House’s PR flunkies, remember?
• We call that “a lie.”
• And – possibly more importantly – “business as usual.”

Let me expand on that last point a bit: the merit of providing insurance subsidies to small business owners is a legitimate point of contention for political debate. What is not a legitimate point of contention is whether the mealy-mouthed, deliberately misleading rhetoric on this issue coming from this administration is compatible with the idealistic-sounding rhetoric that came from the political campaign that became this administration. It’s not compatible, and I’m under no obligation to pretend that the White House is not measuring up to its own freely-given promise to be something different.

And I’m sorry, but we cannot have a substantive policy debate in this country as long as the other side continues to insist that they are led by demigods, instead of men.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.