We knew Obama was prevaricating when he told us his purpose to cram through Obamacare was to provide universal access to coverage and reduce costs, but how many people did he fool? How many are still fooled?

He repeatedly complained that America spent more on health care than other nations “but wasn’t any healthier.” He distorted the numbers of chronically uninsured. He lied about his support for a single-payer plan and denied the “public option” was a Trojan horse for such a plan. He misled us concerning his intention to federally fund abortions and the coverage of illegals.

He deceitfully insisted he wouldn’t interfere with the patient-doctor relationship, that patients could choose to keep their own plans, that his plan wouldn’t lead to rationing and that it would increase the quality of care.

Perhaps his most cynical fraud was that he would not sign a bill that would add one dime to the federal deficit. Along with the uninsured canard, this was his biggest selling point for Obamacare: Health care costs were skyrocketing, and he had the magic bullet to remedy that.

But less than two months after he signed the bill into law, the Congressional Budget Office has admitted its estimate didn’t take into account “discretionary” expenditures that will add some $115 billion in costs.

The administration is now threatening not to fund the bill unless Congress finds sufficient savings elsewhere to nullify that “unexpected” cost increase. Just how stupid can these people think we are? They knew about these false cost assumptions before Obama signed the bill.

But as bad as the president’s lies were about the costs of his plan, many of us warned that a greater evil in Obamacare was its guaranteed path to reducing our freedoms. Ronald Reagan was not just issuing platitudes when he said, “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. ... From here, it’s a short step to all the rest of socialism.”

No truer words were ever spoken, which is exactly why Obama misrepresented almost every aspect of his plan in order to get it passed. His real purpose, as many of us have been saying ad nauseam, is to greatly increase the size and scope of government and, in the process, radically redistribute wealth.

As it turns out, we don’t have to wait any longer to prove we were correct about this, too. Obama has nominated Donald Berwick to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. l discovered in research that experts believe under Obamacare, the role of the CMS will be greatly expanded to define the quality of health care for every insurance plan, set reimbursement rates for physicians in Medicare and Medicaid and decide how valuable certain treatments are. According to Robert M. Goldberg of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, Berwick, essentially, “will get control of the practice of medicine.”

It would be scary enough for a bureaucrat of normal sensibilities and politics to have such control, but RedState has uncovered the extent of Berwick’s radicalism — like so many of Obama’s other appointees. Berwick is an Ivy League academic who loves wealth redistribution and believes health care is an ideal vehicle to achieve it. He said: “Any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must ... redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional.”

Berwick also lusts after the British system of socialized medicine, saying America’s health care system runs in the “darkness of private enterprise.”

How much more proof do people need about Obama?

David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His commentary is distributed by Creators Syndicate.