Thursday, September 10, 2009

FACT CHECK: Obama Drops Iffy Line on Healthcare Plan

"The change was subtle, but significant.

In his speech to Congress on Wednesday night, President Barack Obama gave a more accurate -- and less reassuring -- account of the impact of his proposed health care overall than he has done in the past.

It went by in a blink.

He told Americans that nothing he is proposing will force businesses or consumers to change their existing insurance coverage. That much is true.

It's also true that nothing in his plan guarantees that policies people have now will continue to be available in the same form. In earlier accounts, he spoke with unmerited certainty in saying people who are happy with their current insurance can simply keep it.

Other parts of his speech repeated some of the oversimplified claims that have marked his salesmanship. A look at some of his assertions Wednesday night:

OBAMA: "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: 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. The Congressional Budget Office analyzed the health care bill written by House Democrats and said that by 2016 some 3 million people who now have employer-based care would lose it because their employers would decide to stop offering it.

In the past Obama repeatedly said, "If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period." Now he's stopping short of that unconditional guarantee by saying nothing in the plan "requires" any change.

He's dropped the "period."
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OBAMA: "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits either now or in the future. Period."

THE FACTS: Despite this "period," the White House and congressional Democrats have already 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 was actually 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 only-in-Washington reasoning was that they already decided to exempt this so-called "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.

The administration also said that since Obama already included the doctor payment in his 10-year budget proposal, it didn't have to be counted again.

Even aside from that, the long-term prognosis for the costs of the health care legislation has not been good.

Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf had this to say in July about evolving health care legislation: "We do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs."

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OBAMA: Requiring insurance companies to cover preventive care like mammograms and colonoscopies "makes sense, it saves money, and it saves lives."

The facts: Studies have shown that much preventive care -- particularly tests like the ones Obama mentions -- actually costs money instead of saving it. That's because detecting acute diseases like breast cancer in their early stages involves testing many people who would never end up developing the disease. The costs of a large number of tests, even if they're relatively cheap, will outweigh the costs of caring for the minority of people who would have ended up getting sick without the testing."

For the rest of the story click below.

Http://politics.foxnews.mobi/quickPage.html?page=16484&content=20622029&pageNum=-1
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