Once you get caught in a whopper, it’s hard to talk your way out of it. ObamaCare architect Ezekiel Emanuel’s explanation yesterday on Fox’s Sunday show of what President Obama REALLY meant when he repeatedly said that, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, probably didn’t help the president’s cause.

Here is yesterday’s exchange between Dr. Emanuel and Fox’s Chris Wallace (from Hotair):   

Wallace: President Obama famously promised, ‘if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.’ Doesn’t that turn out to be just as false, just as misleading, as his promise about ‘if you like your plan, you can keep your plan’? Isn’t a fact, sir, that a number, most in fact, of the ObamaCare health plans that are being offered on the exchanges exclude a number of doctors and hospitals to lower costs?

Emanuel: The president never said you were going to have unlimited choice of any doctor in the country you want… But look, if you want to pay more for an insurance company that covers your doctor, you can do that. It’s a matter of choice. … The issue isn’t the selective networks… People are going to have a choice of whether they want to pay a certain amount for a selective network, or pay more for a broader network. They get that choice.

Now they tell us…

The Wall Street Journal (sorry, subscription required) also has a transcript of the Emanuel-Wallace exchange, and it concludes with this observation:

It’s nice to hear a central planner embrace choice, except this needs translating too. The truth is that you may be able to pay more to keep your doctor, but only after you choose one of ObamaCare's preferred plans that already costs you more than your old plan that ObamaCare forced you to give up.

Consumers who buy ObamaCare policies may be in for yet another rude awakening: there will be reduced access to several of the nation’s top hospitals—you know, the ones that are able to save lives that might otherwise be lost (Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York or MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston).

The Weekly Standard quotes from the Financial Times (subscription required):

Americans who are buying insurance plans over online exchanges, under what is known as Obamacare, will have limited access to some of the nation’s leading hospitals, including two world-renowned cancer centres.

Amid a drive by insurers to limit costs, the majority of insurance plans being sold on the new healthcare exchanges in New York, Texas, and California, for example, will not offer patients’ access to Memorial Sloan Kettering in Manhattan or MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, two top cancer centres, or Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, one of the top research and teaching hospitals in the country.

ObamaCare is also on the path to create “a Medicaid time bomb.”

Given all these new bits of information, it is reasonable to say that only one thing stands in the way of repeal of this disastrous law: the ego of Democrats. One in particular.