It sounds like President Obama has offered an apology for misleading people about their ability to keep their healthcare plans under is new program.

However, University of California – Berkeley student Kevin Gu questions the wisdom of taking the President at is word…at any time on any subject.

In his campaign to pass Obamacare, President Obama outlined his ideas for health care reform, promising, among other things, that “if you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period.” But that promise, like so many others, turned out to be impossible to uphold.

Obama’s landmark reform bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, included provisions that enacted greater protection for health care consumers, such as preventing health insurance providers from dropping people with pre-existing conditions. As a result, however, the bill eliminated some of the shoddier plans on the market, plans the president simultaneously guaranteed would remain available to consumers. This is reflective of a campaign that was based on promises and a presidency defined by a vain struggle to uphold them.

After winning the 2008 presidential election, Obama and Biden set up a website, Change.gov, that laid out the promises Obama had made throughout his campaign. The transition website was supposed to allow voters to compare the statements Obama made on the campaign trail with the actual actions he was taking as president. One of those was a promise “to strengthen whistle-blower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud and abuse of authority in government.” Whistle-blowers, the website said, were “often the best source of information about waste, fraud and abuse in government.”

And symbolically, on June 8 — two days after Edward Snowden’s bombshell leak to the Guardian about the NSA — Change.gov was taken down. The convenient coincidence of the two events made the latter look like an attempt to hide the promises Obama had made while campaigning. And the petition to pardon Edward Snowden on petitions.whitehouse.gov, which reached the 100,000-signature threshold necessary for an official response on June 24, has gone more than four months without a response from the administration.

…We are at a time when trust in the public offices is nearing an all-time low — when will politicians in Washington learn that underpromising and overdelivering isn’t necessarily a bad thing? Because when so often, the candidate we see isn’t the president we get, it’s hard to understand why we should bother.