“Ouch, 340,000 Coloradans aren’t going to be happy with me.”
Despite Colorado Insurance Commissioner Marguerite Salazar’s best attempts to prevent more health care cancellation notices from piling up at the feet of Sen. Mark Udall, she wasn’t able to stop a further 2,000 from being added this month. The 335K figure everyone has been quoting will now be 340K+ figure since these 2,000 are joining another 3,000+ that have been lost since April. As Valerie Richardson at The Washington Times writes:
The state Division of Insurance said in a letter to the Colorado Senate Republicans that another 2,105 policies were discontinued in August in the aftermath of the Affordable Care Act, bringing the total to 341,666.
The growing tally has dogged the Democrat Udall in his bid for re-election. Republicans have blasted him for voting in favor of Obamacare and then repeating President Obama’s claim that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” which PolitiFact voted the 2013 Lie of the Year.
One would think having been caught telling the lie of the year would lead Udall to run a campaign that tried to overcompensate for such a fact. Not Udall. Rather, he made the radical decision to double down by running a campaign chalked full of lies and deceits. Any hope that he would reassure Coloradans that he wasn’t the liar of the year PolitFact called him in 2013, went out the window even before his first extremist ad. Udall has followed that first ad with more negative, cynical, and—dare we say—dour political ads with nary an apology to any of the now 340K+ Coloradans who have lost the very health care plans Udall promised they could keep. This doesn’t even begin to count the number of Coloradans who’ve lost their doctors because the one they have been seeing all these years is no longer covered by their insurance.
In such a tight race between Udall and Rep. Cory Gardner, a few hundred votes on Election Day could be the deciding factor. Udall can’t be sleeping easy knowing each day hundreds and hundreds of more Coloradans are getting cancellation notices in their mailboxes. Cancellation notices that he promised would never come. Adding them to the already 340K+ Coloradans makes a very large bloc of Colorado voters Udall directly lied to. They would be more than enough to be the death knell of Udall’s political career.