If you like your doctor (and you're willing to pay higher premiums than you did before), you can keep your doctor. Period.

In a previous blog post I pointed out that Ezra Klein was recommending that Democrats run in the 2014 mid-term elections on the argument that "the cancellations, reduced networks, higher premiums, and increased deductibles that you are experiencing in your health insurance are how Obamacare, brought to you exclusively by Democrats, is supposed to work."

This morning in an exchange with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the architects of Obamacare, adduced another argument that Democrats will be able to use in the 2014 mid-term elections, namely, "if you like your doctor, and you're willing to pay higher premiums than you did before, you can keep him:"

EMANUEL: [I]f you want to pay more for an insurance company that covers your doctor, you can do that. This is a matter of choice. We know in all sorts of places you pay more for certain -- for a wider range of choices or wider range of benefits. The issue isn't the selective networks. People keep saying, 'Oh, the problem is you're going to have a selective network.'

WALLACE: Well, if you lose your doctor or lose your hospital --

EMANUEL: Let me just say something. People are going to have a choice as to whether they want to pay a certain amount for a selective network or pay more for a broader network.

WALLACE: Which means your premiums will probably go up.

EMANUEL: They get that choice. That's a choice you've always made.

WALLACE: Which means your premium may go up over what you were paying so that, in other words --

EMANUEL: No one guaranteed you that your premium wouldn't increase. Premiums have been going up.

WALLACE: The president guaranteed me I could keep my doctor.

EMANUEL: And if you want to, you can pay for it.

Also, Mr Emanuel's claim that "No one guaranteed you that your premium wouldn't increase." is a direct contradiction of Mr Obama's assurance that Obamacare would lower the premiums of the typical family by $2500 a year:

In an Obama administration, we’ll lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year. And we’ll do it by investing in disease prevention, not just disease management; by investing in a paperless health care system to reduce administrative costs; and by covering every single American and making sure that they can take their health care with them if they lose their job. … And we won’t do all this twenty years from now, or ten years from now. We’ll do it by the end of my first term as president of the United States.

As I said in the previous blog post: watching the Dems run in the 2014 elections on arguments like these is going to be fun.