Obama Not Familiar With House Plan

In response to my earlier blog & e-mail, "Liberal Policy-Makers & Healthcare," Raleigh sent an article from The Heritage Foundation. I include the text in its entirety below. Go to the website, if interested, by clicking here: "Obama Not Familiar with House Bill."

While looking for the article Raleigh sent me, I ran across another alarming one: "Should Government Determine the Value of Human Life?" Peter Singer, Princeton bioethics (using the term "ethics" loosely) professor & philosopher, wrote an article for New York Time's Magazine, "Why We Must Ration Health Care." (Singer also advocates infanticide, proposing that abortion be made legal for 28 days after birth, in order to allow parents to decide whether to keep an "imperfect" child.)

When I began sending various e-mails, it was for the tongue-in-cheek purpose of getting the liberal message out since they believe that that is what is holding them back from greater political success. I contend that getting the liberal message out will generate the opposite effect, so I am happy to help them out.

But it is not all fun and games. Combatting the left is not a hobby; it is a fight for life!

Keep the message going!


----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2009 11:14 AM
Subject: RE: Liberal Policy-Makers & Healthcare

Chuck, What is scary is Obama of his own admission isn't aware of what is in his health bill. Ouch! SEE Below. Raleigh

Obama Admits He’s “Not Familiar” With House Bill
With the public’s trust in his handling of health care tanking (50%-44% of Americans disapprove), the White House has launched a new phase of its strategy designed to pass Obamacare: all Obama, all the time. As part of that effort, Obama hosted a conference call with leftist bloggers urging them to pressure Congress to pass his health plan as soon as possible.

During the call, a blogger from Maine said he kept running into an Investors Business Daily article that claimed Section 102 of the House health legislation would outlaw private insurance. He asked: “Is this true? Will people be able to keep their insurance and will insurers be able to write new policies even though H.R. 3200 is passed?” President Obama replied: “You know, I have to say that I am not familiar with the provision you are talking about.” (quote begins at 17:10)

This is a truly disturbing admission by the President especially considering that later in the call, Obama promises yet again: “If you have health insurance, and you like it, and you have a doctor that you like, then you can keep it. Period.” How can Obama keep making this promise if he is not familiar with the health legislation that is being written in Congress? Details matter.

We are familiar with the passage IBD sites, and as we wrote last week, the House bill does not outright outlaw private individual health insurance, but it does effectively regulate it out of existence. The House bill does allow private insurance to be sold, but only “Exchange-participating health benefits plans.” In order to qualify as an “Exchange-participating health benefits plan,” all health insurance plans must conform to a slew of new regulations, including community rating and guaranteed issue. These will all send the cost of private individual health insurance skyrocketing. Furthermore, all these new regulations would not apply just to individual insurance plans, but to all insurance plans. So the House bill will also drive up the cost of your existing employer coverage as well. Until, of course, it becomes so expensive that your company makes the perfectly economical decision to dump you into the government plan.

President Obama may not care to study how many people will lose their current health insurance if his plan becomes law, but like most Americans, we do. That is why we partnered with the Lewin Group to study how many Americans would be forced into the government “option” under the House health plan. Here is what we found:

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.

It is truly frightening that the President of the United States is pressuring Congress in an all out media blitz to pass legislation that he flatly admits he has not read and is not familiar with.

President Obama owes it to the Americans people to stop making promises about what his health plan will and will not do until he has read it, and can properly defend it in public, to his own supporters.