A week after he signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama went on a road trip to Portland, Maine, to boast and prevaricate about what he had just done.

“So now that this bill is finally law and all the folks who have been playing politics will finally have to confront the reality of what this reform is, they’re also going to have to confront the reality of what it isn’t,” said Obama, introducing a lie that has gotten belated, but much-deserved, attention in recent days.

“They’ll have to finally acknowledge that this isn’t a government takeover of our health care system,” he said. “They’ll see that if Americans like their doctor, they will keep their doctor. And if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen in the future.”

Anyone who actually read the law – or even just a small part of it – would have known this was untrue.

On just the 13th of its 906 pages, PPACA empowered Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius with a particularly insidious means of forcing Americans out of their current health care plans.

Here, the law says: “A group health plan and a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage shall, at a minimum, provide coverage for and shall not impose any cost sharing requirements for … with respect to women, such additional preventive care and screenings … as provided for in comprehensive guidelines supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration for purposes of this paragraph.”

Under the authority of this passage, Sebelius issued the mandate that requires virtually all health insurance plans to cover sterilizations, contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs and IUDs.

Many Americans who had plans that did not cover these things wanted to keep them – because they morally objected to paying for abortion-inducing drugs and devices.

Among these was the Green family. They own the Hobby Lobby stores. Like many others, they sued the administration arguing that this regulation is not only forcing them out of a health care plan they like, but is forcing them to act against the teachings of their Christian faith.

President Obama’s solicitor general asked the U.S. Supreme Court in September to take up the Green family’s case and to tell this family they cannot keep their plan even though they like it.

In its request for the Supreme Court to take up the Green’s case, Obama’s Justice Department candidly explained that the administration had always intended for the contraception mandate to eventually entrap virtually all health care plans, even those that were “grandfathered” at the time Obamacare was enacted.

“A grandfathered plan is one that was in existence on March 23, 2010 and has not undergone any of a defined set of changes,” the administration told the court. “The government estimates that by 2013, a majority of group health plans will lose their grandfathered status.”

“The acts grandfathering provision, however, does not effect a permanent exemption,” the administration told the court, “instead, it is transitional in effect (applying to a variety of the act provisions, not just the preventive-services coverage requirement) and is intended to minimize disruption to existing coverage as the affordable care act is implemented.”

In other words, this “transitional” grandfathering provision helped cover up Obama’s lie that people could keep their plan if they liked it – until 2013.

Or: Until after Obama had to stand for re-election in 2012.

In his first press conference as president in 1981, Ronald Reagan, who would lead the West to victory in the Cold War, startled the liberal press when he accurately described the mendacity of the leaders of the Soviet Union, who were seeking a “one-world socialist or communist state.”

They “have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause,” said Reagan, “meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that, and that is moral, not immoral.

"And we operate on a different set of standards,” Reagan said.

Not anymore.

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