President Barack Obama's Health Speech

[_Brackite]

Hello All Here,

Are There Any Opinions Here About The Speech???


http://www.whitehouse.gov/


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[_JohnStuartMill]

I'm a reasonably pro-market Democrat, and I thought it was great. It's nice to have a grown-up in the White House for a change.

[_richardMdBorn]

Obama asserts that he will partially pay for his plan by cutting waste and fraud. If there is so much waste and fraud in the system today, let's see Obama cut it from the system for a couple of years and then we'll consider his plan.

[_JohnStuartMill]

That wouldn't necessarily work, richard, because part of Obama's claim is that the savings will come as a result of aspects of his plan.

[_The Nehor]

This plan should make health care more accessible but premiums will go up under this plan.

Eliminating annual and lifetime caps will increase the risk to the insurer.

Capping out of pocket expenses will have the same effect.

This worries me a little. He insists this plan will lower costs for businesses and individuals. I do not see how.

[_richardMdBorn]

That wouldn't necessarily work, richard, because part of Obama's claim is that the savings will come as a result of aspects of his plan.

How convenient. Even the CBO has said that Obama's claims for savings are nonsense.

When Associated Propaganda basically calls Obama a liar, things are changing.

The president's speech to Congress contained a variety of oversimplifications and omissions in laying out what he wants to do about health insurance.

A look at some of Obama's claims and how they square with the facts or the fuller story:___

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

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.

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

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

CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf had this to say in July: "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."

___

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. 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.

I hope that people caught this. The weasel words are starting to appear on this pledge.

OBAMA: "The reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally." One congressman, South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson, shouted "You lie!" from his seat in the House chamber when Obama made this assertion. Wilson later apologized.

THE FACTS: The facts back up Obama. 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.

The courts will decide that it violate equal protection for medical to not cover illegal aliens like they did on schools and Democrats will be SHOCKED, SHOCKED.

OBAMA: "Don't pay attention to those scary stories about how your benefits will be cut. ... That will never happen on my watch. I will protect Medicare."

THE FACTS: Obama and congressional Democrats want to pay for their health care plans in part by reducing Medicare payments to providers by more than $500 billion over 10 years. The cuts would largely hit hospitals and Medicare Advantage, the part of the Medicare program operated through private insurance companies.

Although wasteful spending in Medicare is widely acknowledged, many experts believe some seniors almost certainly would see reduced benefits from the cuts. That's particularly true for the 25 percent of Medicare users covered through Medicare Advantage.

Supporters contend that providers could absorb the cuts by improving how they operate and wouldn't have to reduce benefits or pass along costs. But there's certainly no guarantee they wouldn't.

___

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.

The Congressional Budget Office wrote in August: "The evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall."

That doesn't mean preventive care doesn't make sense or save lives. It just doesn't save money.

___

OBAMA: "If you lose your job or change your job, you will be able to get coverage. If you strike out on your own and start a small business, you will be able to get coverage."

THE FACTS: It's not just a matter of being able to get coverage. Most people would have to get coverage under the law, if his plan is adopted.

In his speech, Obama endorsed mandatory coverage for individuals, an approach he did not embrace as a candidate.

He proposed during the campaign — as he does now — that larger businesses be required to offer insurance to workers or else pay into a fund. But he rejected the idea of requiring individuals to obtain insurance. He said people would get insurance without being forced to do so by the law, if coverage were made affordable. And he repeatedly criticized his Democratic primary rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, for proposing to mandate coverage.

"To force people to get health insurance, you've got to have a very harsh penalty," he said in a February 2008 debate.

Now, he says, "individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance — just as most states require you to carry auto insurance."

He proposes a hardship waiver, exempting from the requirement those who cannot afford coverage despite increased federal aid.

___

OBAMA: "There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage."

THE FACTS: Obama time and again has referred to the number of uninsured as 46 million, a figure based on year-old Census data. The new number is based on an analysis by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, which concluded that about two-thirds of Americans without insurance are poor or near poor. "These individuals are less likely to be offered employer-sponsored coverage or to be able to afford to purchase their own coverage," the report said. By using the new figure, Obama avoids criticism that he is including individuals, particularly healthy young people, who choose not to obtain health insurance.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090910/ap_ ... fact_check

[_EAllusion]

Yeah, every analysis I've read worth taking seriously suggests that increased preservative care does not reduce medical costs down the road - as one might intuitively think - but on balance results in a net increase of costs. As the link above says, it's simply a matter of increased broad-based testing and consultation costing more than treating the amount of people who otherwise would've had serious illnesses prevented by such care.

The estimates on how much cleaning up fraud and inefficiency can save in the budget also is way overgenerous, especially when you consider that you can't weed out these inefficiencies by snapping your fingers.

The kind of health care reform I favor has zero chance of passing ever. We're not going to disentangle the government from health care coverage at this point. I think a true single-payer system would be significantly more preferable to what we have now, but we're still in a land of public-private partnerships that result in corporatist distortions of the market that might as well be the government handing giant sacks of money to the well-connected.

[_bcspace]

Obama lied when he said he wants competition in the insurance industry because he knows that no one will be able to compete with taxpayer funded government option.

And therefore by extension he lied when he said no one will be required to change their current plan. Of course it depends on what you mean by "required", but two of his proposals were to prevent insurance companies from dropping coverage as well as price controls. Those two things alone will make it impossible for insurance companies to compete and everyone will be forced to go with the government option. This is exactly the retrenchment the socialists have wanted because they know it will eventually result in what they want anyway.

Bottom line: This was a proposal for universal coverage.

[_EAllusion]

Bottom line: This was a proposal for universal coverage.

Heh. Even the non-public option versions at reform, which are the most likely to pass, are aiming at universal health care. That's the explicit goal here. It's not some hidden agenda. You picked the wrong term to describe government operated insurance, which is really what you are interested in talking about.

What's most likely to pass here is akin to the universal coverage plan Nixon pushed for before being done in by Watergate. (Democrats fought against it in favor of single-payer). In your view, was Nixon a Marxist as you are claiming of Obama because of issues like this?

As far as whether a public option will out compete private insurers, that isn't necessarily the case. It depends on how much teeth is given to that option. It's no secret that many Democrats want it to do just that to create an effective single-payer system. They will likely continue out into the future trying to buff it up if they can, but it's no guarantee that's what will happen. If it gets its foot in the door it probably will stay, though, as people will actually like the program just as they do Medicare or Social Security.

[_dartagnan]

Obama lied when he said he wants competition in the insurance industry because he knows that no one will be able to compete with taxpayer funded government option.

He didn't lie because there will be no "taxpayer funded government option."

This is what he said about this straw man:

"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've insisted that like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects."

Come on BC, you're better than this.