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Obama's Health Care News Conference

 

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Summary
President Obama tried to sell his health care overhaul in prime time, mangling some facts in the process. He also strained to make the job sound easier to pay for than experts predict.

  • Obama promised once again that a health care overhaul "will be paid for." But congressional budget experts say the bills they've seen so far would add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit over the next decade.
  • He said the plan "that I put forward" would cover at least 97 percent of all Americans. Actually, the plan he campaigned on would cover far less than that, and only one of the bills now being considered in Congress would do that.
  • He said the "average American family is paying thousands" as part of their premiums to cover uncompensated care for the uninsured, implying that expanded coverage will slash insurance costs. But the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation puts the cost per family figure at $200.
  • Obama claimed his budget "reduced federal spending over the next 10 years by $2.2 trillion" compared with where it was headed before. Not true. Even figures from his own budget experts don't support that. The Congressional Budget Office projects a $2.7 trillion increase, not a $2.2 trillion cut.
  • The president said that the United States spends $6,000 more on average than other countries on health care. Actually, U.S. per capita spending is about $2,500 more than the next highest-spending country. Obama's figure was a White House-calculated per-family estimate.

Analysis
With the health care debate on Capitol Hill raging on, President Barack Obama held a prime-time news conference July 22 to make his pitch for a health care bill once again to the American public. Among his facts and figures, we found some false and questionable statements.

Paying For It
Obama promised that a health care overhaul "will be paid for." Thus far, that's been a tall order.

The House bill doesn't pay for itself, adding a net $239 billion over 10 years to the federal deficit, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation. The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee bill is much further away from covering its costs. The CBO estimated that legislation would bring a net deficit increase of $597 billion over 10 years. The Senate bill, CBO said, only produced net savings of $48 billion (compared to current law), while the House came up with more money, saving $219 billion and bringing in $583 billion in federal revenue over that 2010-2019 period.

As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan group, said in a report released this month, it's tough to save money while greatly expanding health care coverage at the same time:

CRFB: More access and broader coverage do not save money, however. Greater coverage will increase health spending. Unless major changes are successfully implemented in health care delivery and payment systems, costs will continue to rise from a larger base at a rapid pace. Moreover, potential savings are speculative, while costs are far more certain. That imbalance suggests that unless there is broad popular support for the measures that will be required to achieve savings, the nation's health care bill could become that much more unaffordable.

Obama went on to say that "the entire cost of that has to be paid for and it has got to be deficit-neutral. And we identified two-thirds of those costs to be paid for by tax dollars that are already being spent right now."

"Identified" is the key word—the White House may have pinpointed ways it says can save that much, but whether the president can make these happen is an open question. Obama has spoken before about saving around $650 billion (about two-thirds of a cost of $1 trillion over 10 years) by cutting spending, largely in Medicare. But proposed cuts in payments to insurers and hospitals are likely to draw strong opposition from lobbyists and lawmakers. And Obama admitted last night that legislators hadn't adopted his proposals: "Not all of the cost-saving measures I just mentioned were contained in Congress' draft legislation," he said—but he remained optimistic, adding that "even though we still have a few issues to work out, what's remarkable at this point is not how far we have left to go, it's how far we've already come."

Obama detailed a few of his Medicare savings proposals last night and went into greater detail in a speech June 15 at the American Medical Association conference. Some of the ideas are backed up by independent studies, at least in theory: Obama proposes introducing a competitive bidding process for Medicare Advantage, a program through which private insurers offer Medicare coverage and get higher payments from the government than standard Medicare reimbursements. Last night, he said it would save "over $100 billion of unwarranted subsidies that go to insurance companies"; he's said before that it would save $177 billion over 10 years. And the CBO has estimated such a proposal could save nearly that much, $159 billion over 10 years.

Other proposals are more vague: Obama has called for adjusting Medicare payments to "reflect new advances and productivity gains in our economy," which, he told the AMA, would "create incentives for providers to deliver care more efficiently," saving about $109 billion over 10 years.

As CBS News anchor Katie Couric recently asked Obama, "[A]ren't a lot of these cost savings, Mr. President, theoretical?. … [T]here are no guarantees these projected savings will really happen."

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Member Comments

  • Posted By: barryt @ 11/21/2009 7:06:12 PM

    I wonder how this will turn out.I think its to close to call at this point.

    Barry Treash
    BarryT@readylinkhealthcare.net

  • Posted By: ForumLight @ 10/14/2009 1:02:44 PM

    www.onenewsnow.com/Perspectives/Default.aspx?id=720312

    Do you think Congress should vote on bills without reading them? How about voting on bills that don't even exist yet, except in fragments?

    The Senate Finance Committee is poised to vote on a massive healthcare reform bill on Tuesday allegedly authored by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.). A glaring, outrageous, unreported fact is that the bill's actual text has been kept secret. No one actually knows what's in it - not even the senators who will be told to vote for it.

    Perhaps the Nobel committee will award President Obama another prize to share with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, for "imagination in medical financing."





    Bits and pieces are leaking out, but entire sections will be added later. That's what happened with the House version. Nobody read the bill, and 75 "phantom" amendments were added after the vote. A similar maneuver happened in the Senate when a key committee approved another version of a sweeping healthcare bill in July without seeing the text. Actual language was unveiled months later in September.

    In short, senators will follow recent precedent and be voting on something that does not even exist yet.

    Even the Congressional Budget Office, which issued a report this week saying the Baucus plan would cost under $900 billion instead of more than a trillion, was operating without actual text. When the CBO crunched the detailed, 1,018-page House version this summer, it reported that it would cost far more than President Obama claimed. Obama then broke precedent and summoned the CBO director to the White House for a "talk." Now the CBO says the Senate bill will cost less. They think. They hope. They speculate.

    ???

    Sen. Reid continues to insist that he wants a "public option" that would lead to a "single-payer" system, which means the end of private insurance and the dawn of socialized medicine. Just ask Barney Frank. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said this week that she has the votes necessary to ram through a bill with "the public option" as soon as it comes back to her chamber.

    "The real bill will be another 1,000-page, trillion dollar experiment...that vastly expands the role of the federal government in the personal healthcare decisions of every American," Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) warned.

    House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer would not rule out the possibility that the House would vote for identical Senate language, thus avoiding having the bill go to conference for scrutiny and debate and getting it quickly to President Obama's desk.

    Stunned by the August town halls, Tea parties, and the massive Sept. 12 taxpayer rally in Washington, liberals know the window is closing on their plan to nationalize one-sixth of America's economy and put our healthcare decisions in the hands of government bureaucrats. So they are working in the dark to ram this through before most Americans find out.
    ...

  • Posted By: NewsWkDickG @ 08/25/2009 4:49:30 PM

    (continuing)


    Maybe the biggest mistake the Democrats have made is in not aggressively investigating and prosecuting the Bush-Cheney administration for all they have done in misleading this country, in using their offices and America's resources for their private agenda to benefit Special Interests and a select few, for their efforts aimed to benefit those powerful, influential and wealthy few who return overt and covert support, contributions and then promise after office compensation (kickbacks), all while the average American was given apathy, the costs and an abundance of subterfuge. Had the Democrats been really diligent in that effort, a lot of the lies and abuses would have been clearly identified and vividly exposed and today maybe the public would not be so easily deceived and manipulated. That has not been the case and the deceptive and manipulative tactics aggressively continue. Now just when we need the Republicans to seek equitable and conscientious compromise for everyone???s best interest, they once again are disgustingly and arrogantly irresponsible, focused on winning in politics at all cost, concentrating on dishonestly being obstructionists. It is now the responsibility of the public to see all of it on their own, to ignore the subterfuge, to recognize the tactics and to refuse to be manipulated and used. That can be achieved only by being disciplined to ignore the rhetoric and to always look at who really benefits, who really pays the costs, who is providing the support (covert as well as overt) and rationally and objectively checking personal biases (appealed to in order to excite emotions and to manipulate) and to then see the truth. I personally am an ex-long-term Republican, a moderate conservative, who believes we need both parties being effective, both honestly and responsibly serving the people, all of the people and not only the few. Hopefully that will come to be but no way will it ever happen if Special Interests and the few can continue to manipulate and control.

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