3 Pinocchios for "The White House effort to blame insurance companies for lost plans."

From WaPo's Fact Checker Glenn Kessler, who, you may remember, gave 4 Pinocchios (the max) to Obama's "if you like your plan, you can keep it." Why did he back off a Pinocchio on this but not that? The official distinction between 3 and 4 is: 3 means "Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions" and 4 is "Whoppers."

What Kessler says today about blaming the insurance companies is:

First of all, the administration wrote the rules that set the conditions under which plans lose their grandfathered status. But more important, the law has an effective date so far in the past that it virtually guaranteed that the vast majority of people currently in the individual market would end up with a notice saying they needed to buy insurance on the Obamacare exchanges.

The administration’s effort to pin the blame on insurance companies is a classic case of misdirection. Between 75 and 95 percent of the problem stems from the effective date, but the White House chooses to keep the focus elsewhere.