New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said the American people were misled by the White House's promise that they could keep their health insurance plans if they liked them Tuesday on CBS This Morning.
"The real problem is that people weren't told the truth," he said. "You can remember, they were told that they would be able to keep their policies if they liked them. Now, you hear hundreds of thousands of people across the country being told they couldn't. So the White House needs to square that with what was told to the American people and told to the Congress beforehand, and it doesn't seem to square at the moment, but we'll wait and see."
NBC reported Monday that Obama knew as early as 2010 that his promise that Americans who liked their plans could keep it was false:
NORAH O'DONNELL: Let me ask you about Washington, D.C. and the current problems with Obamacare. Jan Crawford just reported that 800,000 people in New Jersey are getting notices that they can no longer keep their existing plans. Do you wish you had set up a state-run insurance exchange so people could use that?
CHRIS CHRISTIE: No, Norah, and it wouldn't have made any difference, in fact, because you can see all the problems with this. What the federal government wanted us to do in the states was to take on this burden ourselves without telling us how much it would cost or what authority we would have to actually run our exchanges. That's why myself and 33 other governors, both Republican and Democrat, said no to a state-run exchange. The real problem is that people weren't told the truth. You can remember, they were told that they would be able to keep their policies if they liked them. Now, you hear hundreds of thousands of people across the country being told they couldn't. So the White House needs to square that with what was told to the American people and told to the Congress beforehand, and it doesn't seem to square at the moment, but we'll wait and see.