Last week after White House Health Reform Office communications director Linda Douglass appeared in a webvideo purporting to refute claims that “the President intends to ‘eliminate’ private coverage”, we documented statements from Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein, and Noble Prize winning New York Times columnist Paul Krugman all directly contradicting Douglass’ claims.
Now, Verum Serum has flagged a “Fact Check“, from the Obama campaign itself, that also confirms President Barack Obama’s intent to eliminate private insurance coverage. The post is dated January 21, 2008, the height of Obama’s primary fight with Hillary Clinton, and begins:
Rhetoric: “Today, he opposes single payer health care, and attacks Sen. Clinton for proposing a plan that covers everyone”Reality: Obama Has Consistently Said That If We Were Starting From Scratch, He Would Support A Single Payer System, But Now We Need To Build On The System We Have
Later in the post, the Obama campaign offers up this quote from Obama himself to demonstrate Obama’s true support for single payer health care:
If I were designing a system from scratch I would probably set up a single-payer system…But we’re not designing a system from scratch…And when we had a health care forum before I set up my health care plan here in Iowa there was a lot of resistance to a single-payer system. So what I believe is we should set up a series of choices….Over time it may be that we end up transitioning to such a system.
Obamacare will “set up a series of choices” that “over time” will transition into a single payer/government-run health care system. That is how Obama defended his health care plan in the primaries. It is also the exact same reason conservatives have been accurately describing Obamacare as a Trojan Horse for government-run health care. Independent, non-partisan analysis from the Lewin Group backs up these facts:
- Approximately 103 million people would be covered under the new public plan and as a consequence about 83.4 million people would lose their private insurance. This would represent a 48.4 percent reduction in the number of people with private coverage.
- About 88.1 million workers would see their current private, employer-sponsored health plan go away and would be shifted to the public plan.
- Yearly premiums for the typical American with private coverage could go up by as much as $460 per privately insured person, as a result of increased cost-shifting stemming from a public plan modeled on Medicare.
So was Obama misinforming Democratic primary voters in 2008? Or is he misinforming the American people now?
Washington Post business columnist Steve Pearlstein writes about opponents of Obamacare today:
They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.
And just what is the “anything” these “terrorists” are saying about health care?
There is no credible way to look at what has been proposed by the president or any congressional committee and conclude that these will result in a government takeover of the health-care system. That is a flat-out lie whose only purpose is to scare the public and stop political conversation.
A flat out lie? Has Pearlstein seen the video of Noble Prize winning New York Times columnist Paul Krugman saying: “The only reason not to do [single-payer] is that politically it’s hard to do in one step … whereas something that lets people keep the insurance they have but then offers the option of a public plan, that may evolve into single-payer.” Or video of fellow Washington Post employee Ezra Klein saying about public plan supporters: “They have a sneaky strategy, the point of which is to put in place something that over time the natural incentives within its own market will move it to single-payer.” Or video of Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) saying a good public option “is the best way to reach single-payer.” Or video of Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) saying: “A public option will put the private insurance industry out of business and lead to single-payer.” Is Pearlstein saying all these people are terrorists?
Pearlstein does later try to address the issue writing:
There is still a vigorous debate as to whether one of the insurance options offered through those exchanges would be a government-run insurance company of some sort. There are now less-than-even odds that such a public option will survive in the Senate, while even House leaders have agreed that the public plan won’t be able to piggy-back on Medicare. So the probability that a public-run insurance plan is about to drive every private insurer out of business — the Republican nightmare scenario — is approximately zero.
Oh really? Just this month when White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel even hinted that the White House may compromise on the public plan, President Barack Obama corrected him from Russia: “Within hours, the chief of staff was big-footed – all the way from Moscow — by his boss, Mr. Obama, who is in Russia prior to the meeting of the “Group of Eight” economic powers. The White House issued an official statement declaring that Mr. Obama remains committed to the public option.”
Next Pearlstein goes on to attack Congress’ entire budgeting process:
By now, you’ve probably also heard that health reform will cost taxpayers at least a trillion dollars. Another lie.
First of all, that’s not a trillion every year, as most people assume — it’s a trillion over 10 years, which is the silly way that people in Washington talk about federal budgets. On an annual basis, that translates to about $140 billion, when things are up and running.
Just because the Congressional Budget Office scores the budget impacts of congressional legislation over ten-year time frames, does not make them liars. But more importantly, it is the architects of Obamacare who are gaming the ten-year CBO window to make the deficit-busting impact of their legislation seem as small as possible. The chart below demonstrates how the House bill slow-walks the spending side of the health plan to make the price tag as low as possible. Pearlstein plays along with their charade audaciously claiming that the bill costs “translates to about $140 billion” annually.
As you can see the real spending does not even begin until 2013 and by 2019 it comes to $245 billion a year. That is over $100 billion a year more than Pearlstein tries to claim. Commenting on the out year impacts of the House plan, CBO director Doug Elmendorf told Congress:
The net cost of the coverage provisions would be growing at a rate of more than 8 percent per year in nominal terms between 2017 and 2019; we would anticipate a similar trend in the subsequent decade. … Revenue from the surcharge on high-income individuals would be growing at about 5 percent per year in nominal terms between 2017 and 2019; that component would continue to grow at a slower rate than the cost of the coverage expansion in the following decade. … In sum, relative to current law, the proposal would probably generate substantial increases in federal budget deficits during the decade beyond the current 10-year budget window.
Does Pearlstein believe Doug Elmendorf is a terrorist too?