Here's why Obama said people could keep their insurance -- By Philip Klein, The Washington Examiner

President Obama is under intense fire this week as news of millions of Americans receiving insurance cancellation notices has renewed scrutiny of his best-known health care promise.

But to understand why this issue is so problematic for Obama, one must move beyond the debate about whether he was being dishonest by repeatedly promising that, under his program, everybody who liked their health care plans could keep them, and remember why he made the pledge in the first place.

For decades before Obama burst onto the political scene, liberals had been pushing for the federal government to establish some sort of national health care program.

But this effort always ran up against the same obstacle — an overwhelming majority of Americans were happy with their coverage and were leery of any changes.

So the health care status quo prevailed again and again, but most prominently when President Clinton's health care reform effort went down in flames in 1994.

Eventually, Democrats learned that whenever proposing changes to the health care system, they had to emphasize that the changes wouldn’t affect those who already had coverage they liked.

In 2007, when Obama was still considered a long shot to win the Democratic presidential nomination, then-frontrunner Hillary Clinton was barnstorming early primary states telling audiences that under her universal coverage proposal, “If you have health insurance, and you like it, you keep it, no questions asked.”

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