Hope and Fail

Same ol’ health care speech, same ol’ lies

It’s beginning to feel like déjà vu. President Obama jumps on the stage of an auditorium in Anytown, U.S.A. Amid the cheers and applause, someone in the audience shouts, “I love you!” The president quips, “I love you back!”

The president starts reading the teleprompter, and eventually the mirror staring back at him tells Obama to say Americans who like their current health insurance can keep it. “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”

We’ve heard it so many times, and not once has it been true.

Such was the case during the president’s speech at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pa.

He continued to propagate his fabricated promises about health care reform. And he knows they’re fabricated.

The president told the audience:

And that’s why my proposal builds on the current system where most Americans get their health insurance from their employer. If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.

That doesn’t coincide with what the president told House Republicans gathered Jan. 29:

The last thing I will say, though — let me say this about health care and the health care debate, because I think it also bears on a whole lot of other issues. If you look at the package that we’ve presented — and there’s some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example, we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your — if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.

In fact, the Congressional Budget Office, whom Obama cites often, said in December that the Senate bill would force some 10 million Americans out of their current health plans. And it wasn’t “some of the provisions that got snuck in” that violate the president’s empty promise.

The health care reform plan raises minimum standards for health insurance coverage. If you’re happy with your current insurance, and it doesn’t meet the new, federally-mandated standards, you won’t get to keep it.

What’s more, in many cases the cost of paying the federal penalty for not carrying insurance (or offering it if you’re a business) will be substantially more affordable to being insured. We can be sure that many people (and many businesses) will choose no coverage and pay the cheaper penalty.

Unless “the provisions that got snuck in” were somehow “snuck out” in the dead of night, they’re still there. Not everyone who is happy with their insurance will be able to keep it. Period.

The president did get something right during his speech. Yet again he said, “the time for talk is over.” Agreed. Especially when the talk is nothing but a bald-faced lie.