Facts Vs Barack Hussain OHbama 9-14 speach

Fact checking President Barack Obama’s health care speech from last
night, the Associated Press reports: “The president’s speech to
Congress contained a variety of oversimplifications and omissions in
laying out what he wants to do about health insurance.” That is an
understatement. We counted no less than 15 spurious claims made by the
President, including:

1. OBAMA: “There are now more than thirty million American citizens who
cannot get coverage.”

THE FACTS: On August 8th, President Obama said [1]: “Reform is
obviously essential for the 46 million Americans who don’t have health
insurance.” So did 16 million uninsured people just disappear in the
span of two months? Not quite. The problem is that the 46 million
number was always highly misleading and the new 30 mi llion number isn’t
much better. According to an analysis based on the 2007 Census data [2]
there were 45.7 million uninsured people in the U.S. in 2007. But 9.3
million of those were non-citizens. Another 6.4 million actually are
enrolled in Medicaid but mistakenly tell the Census they have no health
insurance. Another 4.3 million are eligible for Medicaid or SCHIP but
have not signed up. Another 10 million have no insurance, but also make
more than 3X the poverty level. That means only 15.6 million U.S.
citizens with incomes below 300% of poverty and that are nor already
eligible for taxpayer-subsidized health insurance, are uninsured.

2. OBAMA: “First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of
Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare,
Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your
employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat
this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.”

THE FACTS: First, the statement is just false. According to the
America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) 4.5 million Americans are
covered by Health Savings Accounts. H.R. 3200 gives the Secretary of
Health and Human Services the authority to make such plans illegal. In
both the House Energy and Commerce Committee mark up [3] and the House
Ways and Means Committee mark up [4], Republicans offered amendments
that would have guaranteed Americans’ right to keep their Health
Saving’s account. All of these amendments were defeated by Democrats on
their respective committees. These 4.5 million Americans will lose
their insurance under Obamacare

Second, Americans should never forget that Obama is a lawyer. Here
is how Obama used to issue the same promise [5]: “Under the reform
we’re proposing, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If
you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”
See the difference? Obama used to promise that under his plan “you can
keep your doctor.” But now Americans are only promised that nothing in
the plan “requires you to change what you have.” This is a night and
day difference. Obama is correct that nothing in H.R. 3200 requires
people to change their insurance. But H.R. 3200 does allow all
businesses to shift their employees into the public plan over time.
Under a strong public plan 88.1 million people would be shifted from
their employer-sponsored coverage to the federal plan. [6]

3. OBAMA: “And insurance companies will be required to cover, with no
extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care … That makes sense,
it saves money, and it saves l ives.”

THE FACTS: Preventative care does not save money. So says the
Congressional Budget Office [7] and so says the New England Journal of
Medicine [8].

4. OBAMA: “That’s why under my plan, individuals will be required to
carry basic health insurance – just as most states require you to carry
auto insurance.”

THE FACTS: No states require all adults, let alone all citizens, to
carry auto insurance. Only those who choose to exercise their privilege
to drive are required to purchase auto insurance. Even with that
requirement, many still don’t. [9] According to the Congressional
Budget Office (CBO), a federal individual mandate for health insurance
would be unique and unprecedented because it would “impose a duty on
individuals as members of society” [10] and would “require people to
purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated” [10] by
the government. According to President Barack Obama HHS nominee Dr.
Sherry Glied: “Developing a system to promptly identify and penalize
scofflaws will take effort and ingenuity, particularly in our diverse
and mobile country. It may require a degree of intrusiveness and
bureaucracy that some will find unpalatable.” [9]

5. OBAMA: “There are=2 0also those who claim that our reform effort will
insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false – the reforms I’m
proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.”

THE FACTS: H.R. 3200 does not explicitly pay for health benefits
for illegal immigrants. It never has, and no one has ever said that it
did. The issue is enforcement and the provisions in H.R. 3200 are
completely inadequate to ensure that illegal immigrants do not
illegally obtain health care through the bill. In the House Ways and
Means mark up of H.R. 3200, Rep. Dean Heller (R-NV) introduced an
amendment [11] that would use two citizenship status verification
systems, the Income and Eligibility Verification System (IEVS) and
Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) programs, to
establish an individual’s eligibility to obtain the bill’s proposed
affordability credits or enroll in the public insurance option. Both
programs are currently used to determine citizenship status and
eligibility for other public assistance programs. [12] The Heller
amendment failed on a straight party-line vote.

6. OBAMA: “And one more misunderstanding I want to clear up – under our
plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal
conscience laws will remain in place.”

&nbs p; THE FACTS: In all four mark-ups of health care legislation (three
in [4] the [3] House [13] and one [14] in the Senate), Conservatives
have offered amendments that would have specifically prohibited federal
funds from being used to cover abortion. None of them passed. Instead,
the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed an amendment by Rep.
Lois Capps (D-CA) that actually requires at least one insurance plan to
cover abortion in every geographical region and requires the
newly-created public plan to cover all abortion services. [3]
Furthermore, President Obama told Planned Parenthood on July17, 2007
[15]: “We’re going to set up a public plan that all persons and all
women can access if they don’t have health insurance. It will be a plan
that will provide all essential services, including reproductive
services.” Candidate Obama either was not telling the truth to Planned
Parenthood then or President Obama is not telling the truth to the
American people now.

7. OBAMA: “They argue that these private companies can’t fairly compete
with the government. And they’d be right if taxpayers were subsidizing
this public insurance option. But they won’t be. I have insisted that
like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would
have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects.”

THE FACTS: Obama refutes his own argument in the same paragraph:
“It would also keep pressure on private insurers to keep their policies
affordable and treat their customers better, the same way public
colleges and universities provide additional choice and competition to
students without in any way inhibiting a vibrant system of private
colleges and universities.” No public university is self-sufficient.
None of them rely solely on student tuition. All of them require
taxpayer subsidies every year.

8. OBAMA: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits –
either now or in the future. Period. And to prove that I’m serious,
there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward
with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don’t materialize.”

THE FACTS: According to the Congressional Budget Office, not only
does H.R. 3200 increase the deficit by $239 billion [16] in just the
first ten years, but CBO director Doug Elmendorf told Congress that the
bills crafted by House leaders and the Senate health committee
“significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care
costs.” [16] And according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, H.R.
3200 would run a $1,010 billion deficit in the second decade. [17]

=0 A
9. OBAMA: “Reducing the waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid
will pay for most of this plan.”

THE FACTS: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates [18]
that Title VI of the House bill dealing with Medicare program integrity
will save just $1.3 billion over ten years. That is roughly how much
Medicare spends in a single day. CBO estimates [18] ZERO savings from
Subtitle F in the House bill that deals with Medicaid program
integrity.

10. OBAMA: “This reform will charge insurance companies a fee for their
most expensive policies, which will encourage them to provide greater
value for the money – an idea which has the support of Democratic and
Republican experts. And according to these same experts, this modest
change could help hold down the cost of health care for all of us in
the long-run.”

THE FACTS: These “fees” are nothing more than taxes hidden behind a
thin veil of “fairness” rhetoric [19]. They would actually fall on
ordinary Americans, not insurance executives or stockholders. When you
buy something that is subject to a sales tax who pays the tax – you or
the vendor? Just look at the line “sales tax” on your bill. And if you
tax insurance companies the cost is passed through i n the same way.

Article printed from The Foundry: http://blog.heritage.org