AP fact-checks the speech: Obama was pretty much lying through his teeth
Posted by Bill Dupray
on Sep 10 2009 Filed under Politics.
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By my count, they fact-check 7 of his statements last night and find that he was lying or obfuscating on 5 of them, which means he was telling the truth 28% of the time.
The whopper of the evening was that ObamaCare won’t add a dime to the deficit.
THE FACTS: Though there’s no final plan yet, the White House and congressional Democrats already have shown they’re ready to skirt the no-new-deficits pledge.
House Democrats offered a bill that the Congressional Budget Office said would add $220 billion to the deficit over 10 years. But Democrats and Obama administration officials claimed the bill actually was deficit-neutral. They said they simply didn’t have to count $245 billion of it — the cost of adjusting Medicare reimbursement rates so physicians don’t face big annual pay cuts.
Their reasoning was that they already had decided to exempt this “doc fix” from congressional rules that require new programs to be paid for. In other words, it doesn’t have to be paid for because they decided it doesn’t have to be paid for.
On the tired, dusty old lie that ‘if you like your plan, you can keep it,’ AP says it is word games. It is not for you to decide whether your employer allows you to keep your plan.
OBAMA: “Nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have.”
THE FACTS: That’s correct, as far as it goes. But neither can the plan guarantee that people can keep their current coverage. Employers sponsor coverage for most families, and they’d be free to change their health plans in ways that workers may not like, or drop insurance altogether.
AP sort of backs up Obama on the claim that ‘Illegals won’t get coverage,’ which inspired Joe Wilson to call Obama a liar. But note the caveat.
The House version of the health care bill explicitly prohibits spending any federal money to help illegal immigrants get health care coverage. Illegal immigrants could buy private health insurance, as many do now, but wouldn’t get tax subsidies to help them. Still, Republicans say there are not sufficient citizenship verification requirements to ensure illegal immigrants are excluded from benefits they are not due.
That caveat is the hole through which illegals will get covered. Wilson was right.
They go through a few more biggies and basically come to the conclusion that Obama obviously could never get this thing past the American people unless he lies about it. So he lies.
Related Posts
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- Wilson 1, Obama 0: Senate closes loophole for illegals on ObamaCare
- WaPo: By the way, Obama’s whole “If you like your plan, you can keep it” schtick is a lie
Short URL: http://libertypundits.net/?p=6384
THE FACTS: That’s correct, as far as it goes. But neither can the plan guarantee that people can keep their current coverage. Employers sponsor coverage for most families, and they’d be free to change their health plans in ways that workers may not like, or drop insurance altogether.
I’m confused. Are you actually suggesting that the health bill needs to mandate that employers cannot change their coverage for their employees ever? How the ability for employers to change their coverage any different than the current state of affairs?
Still, Republicans say there are not sufficient citizenship verification requirements to ensure illegal immigrants are excluded from benefits they are not due.
Also confused here. Are you now suggesting a national identity system? Doesn’t this go against conservative principles? Are you really suggesting MORE government just to prevent some illegals from maybe obtaining some amount of healthcare? Again, how is this different than the current state of things?
When these are your top objections, you’re really grasping at straws……
I don’t think many will suggest that employers mandate that they cannot change insurance. That is silly. However, what the democrats don’t realize or don’t want to say, is that many employers will drop insurance altogether. Why shouldn’t they if there is a public option? When that happens you will no longer have the coverage you once had. The president keeps saying you will be able to keep your doctor. That’s nice, but you won’t be able to keep your same coverage.
We have a national identity system already, it is called the social security number. It doesn’t take more government to prevent non-citizens from getting insurance they shouldn’t be getting.
And let me pile on with Robert. John, government-run health care will require employers to offer approved plans to employees or pay a fine. As soon as the cost of the approved plan (which, by itself may be different from what employees already have) exceeds the fine, employers will have a financial incentive to dump the plan and pay the fine. This is the Trojan Horse everyone has been talking about for months. That is the whole point of the Public Option, to kill off private insurance and have the government take control. Yes, employers today can drop coverage anytime they want, but the marketplace has led them to decide it is in their best economic interest to offer coverage to their employees. The Public Option will skew that market because the government doesn’t compete with private industry, it has a monopoly on money (they print it, remember?) and it will destroy private insurance. So, if you think you have all kinds of disputes with your health insurance company now, just wait until all you have is the Department of Health and Human Services to call when you can’t get that prescription filled and all the geniuses that work there are on lunch break and can’t seem to take your call.
As for the illegals, I am not sure what you are talking about. Do you have a problem with verifying citizenship before giving somebody government benefits? Because the Democrats do. The GOP wanted to use the SAVE system to verify legal status for ObamaCare and the Dems defeated the amendment.
However, what the democrats don’t realize or don’t want to say, is that many employers will drop insurance altogether.
I don’t know if will become true. However, I see two problems with the above statement:
1. It’s a statement without any real data to back it up. What’s many? 80%? 50%? Have any employers actually come out and said this?
2. The public option is the lowest common denominator. I’ll claim that many companies will continue to offer their current coverage if only to maintain a competitive edge in hiring, same as they do today. In fact, based on what I’ve read about the bill so far, most current company coverage will easily exceed the public option in benefits.
As for the national ID system….two problems with the social security number:
1. The Social Security Administration admits that the Social Security Act does not require a person to have a Social Security Number to live and work in the United States, nor does it require an SSN simply for the purpose of having one.
2. There are limitations in the Privacy Act about how federal or state agencies can require disclosure of the SSN as a identification number, although in practice this is often done.
Either way, I’m not outright opposed to a national ID system, but I’m surprised you’re not. In general, these kinds of identification issues tends to be more of a conservative bugbear. Do you really want a federal apparatus to track you through the system with a single number? Sounds kind of biblical to me personally.
As soon as the cost of the approved plan (which, by itself may be different from what employees already have) exceeds the fine, employers will have a financial incentive to dump the plan and pay the fine.
This only happens if the approved plan isn’t the lowest common denominator, which from all indications, it will be. I’m fairly confident that most companies that already offer coverage will continue to do so for the reasons you stated, i.e. the labor market dictates that they should. If health coverage matters to me as an employee, I can continue to choose company A over company B because their coverage is better.
However, for those companies whose labor markets dictate NOT offering coverage (read McDonalds or Walmart), their employees will be covered to a minimum bar. These employees end up costing us in two obvious ways when they are not properly covered: (1) The medical profession cannot easily recoup cost of product when these folks can’t pay, which only raises rates for the rest of us and (2) these folks become a burden on society when their finances are essentially destroyed by a single serious illness. I see the public option as the cheaper alternative to spending money dealing with the disenfranchised due to a lack of health insurance (which the private market has no incentive to provide for them), I guess.
The point of the plan is to kill private insurance, as so eloquently stated by Rep. Jan Schakowsky in this video.
The government wants employers to dump their employees on the government, and if you want numbers, Heritage estimates that 88 million people will be dumped from their current plans.
You grossly underestimate the Socialists’ end game.
I didn’t say I liked the SSN system, just that we have it. Personally I think social security is just a government run ponzi scheme.
To piggy back on what Bill said, yes employers use insurance as a competitive measure. Now, they won’t all drop insurance immediately, but over time they will. Which would you rather have, employers dropping employees as a cost cutting measure or insurance as a cost cutting measure? Not only will employers cut insurance to save costs, but the employees will slowly opt out as well for the same reason. Why pay a portion of an employer system when one can get it “for free”? The more that opt out, the more likely the employer will cut it as costs will rise with fewer employees and thus it makes sense to drop it completely.
This same scenario happened last year in Hawaii on a smaller scale. They offered child insurance. People opted out of their own coverage for their children in exchange for the state run version. The verdict? The state canceled it because it cost too much.
As for that common denominator you speak of, again you only have to look at other countries to see how bad that setup really is.
Last comment, I swear.
While we may not necessarily see eye-to-eye, I enjoyed our debate. Much more civilized than “you lie!”, I think.
I guess I’m not convinced that company coverage will go away, mainly because as far as I can tell, the public option is designed as a minimum bar, preventative care approach. Good enough for people who have none, but too low for people who already have coverage. And I believe companies who already provide coverage will continue to do so as a competitive measure in the labor market.
Hawaii was an interesting case. In better times, even with the people who abused it, the cost was fairly low. $600K/year is relatively cheap, and they could’ve tweaked the rules to make it less attractive for people who could afford to pay for it already. I suspect if the economy wasn’t in the state it is currently in, this wouldn’t even be an blip.
Jan was pandering to her demographic, just like Palin does at her gatherings. Fundamentally, I do believe that she’s right that the government is under no obligation to protect insurance companies (or car companies, or banks, or whatever, but that’s another story for another time). I do think the government has an obligation to provide basic services for its citizenry in the cheapest way possible. This can take any number of forms, from indirect tax incentives, to direct public options. In the healthcare case, I feel like the private market has created a situation where it is costing the rest of us a non-trivial amount of money to care for those who do not have health insurance, in taxes, rising cost of healthcare, etc, and I wouldn’t mind exploring alternatives, including a public option. Now, is the public option the ultimate solution? Probably not. In fact, it’s almost certain to have problems, but the current way costs too much while punishing the people who can least afford it.
By the way, I usually take reports from the Heritage Foundation with about the same amount of salt as I would reports from MoveOn.
The truth is probably somewhere in between; it always is.
That doesn’t need to be your last comment. We’ll let you know when you have used up your quota.
You are a believer in liberalism, which is fine. I am a believer that the free market can do virtually everything better than government, including provide benefits to groups that politicians want to help. 87% of people are satisfied with their current health care. So,for starters, Obama is throwing out a very healthy baby with the bath water.
Politicians can, with a stroke of a pen, make it so that people can buy health insurance across state lines, which would immediately lower costs, as companies would have hundreds of millions of new customers to woo with prices and coverage as good as they can make it.
The politicians can give tax breaks to uninsured folks, just as employed folks pay no taxes now on their employer health plans. That would even the playing field. Again, very easy to do.
They could reform malpractice, which would remove the costs of CYA tests and treatments that doctors use now solely to avoid getting sued.
These are quick, easy solutions that can be tried now to help the very small minority of folks who have no coverage, lower costs for everyone, keep the government out of your health care decisions, and minimize the tab to the taxpayers. If they tried that and it didn’t work, they can always come back and try something else, but at least it wouldn’t wreck the entire system in the process.
That would be just too damned easy Bill. The government has never liked things uncomplicated. The more bureaucratically fouled up a program is the happier they are with it. What John Smith fails to understand is no matter what the program, no matter how simple it should or could be, once the government gets involved, it turns into a Kafkiesque (did I spell that right?) nightmare.
Exactly. How’d that Cash for Clunkers thing work out? A freakin’ 4th grader could have run that program better than the feds did. I mean, all they had to do was write a check and destroy a car and it was still a clusterfark.