Calling out the President
Thursday, September 10th, 2009 By Marc KilmerIn his health care speech last night, President Obama said he would “call out” those who misrepresent his plan. Fair enough, there has been a lot of misrepresentation about health care reform legislation from those who oppose it. However, there has also been a lot of misrepresentation about this plan from the President and his allies. So, in the spirit of Pres. Obama, I’m going to “call him out” on a few of his misrepresentations last night:
“…in 34 states, 75 percent of the insurance market is controlled by five or fewer companies. In Alabama, almost 90 percent is controlled by just one company. And without competition, the price of insurance goes up and quality goes down.” – True enough. However, Pres. Obama goes on to say the remedy for this is to have the government “compete” against private insurance. How about the government allow private insurance companies to compete against each other? The reason insurance companies can dominate markets like Obama says is because the federal government enacted a law in 1945 leading to a situation where state governments impose rules and regulations on insurance companies that stifle competition. If you want more competition, Mr. President, we don’t need more rules and regulations. We don’t need a government insurance plan. We need the federal government to repeal the McCarran-Ferguson Act and allow insurance companies to compete with each other.
Preventive care “saves money…” — Nope. As the New England Journal of Medicine says, “screening costs will exceed the savings from avoided treatment in cases in which only a very small fraction of the population would have become ill in the absence of preventive measures.” That is, if you screen people for a variety of diseases, only a small fraction of those people would have gotten the disease. The money you spend on screening all those people will outweigh the money you save from catching the disease early from the very few who are detected early.
The government insurance plan would compete with private insurance “…the same way public colleges and universities provide additional choice and competition to students without in any way inhibiting a vibrant system of private colleges and universities.” — this was right after he said that taxpayers wouldn’t be subsidizing the government insurance plan. The only way public higher education competes with private higher education is through massive state and federal subsidies. So for this government plan to work as Obama intends, he seems to be saying it needs to have huge subsidies.
A note on Rep. Joe Wilson — Rep. Wilson called out that Obama was lying during his speech when he said his plan wouldn’t cover illegal immigrants. Regardless of your views on Pres. Obama, this was outrageous. No President should be heckled. And not only was Rep. Wilson out-of-line in the civility department, he was also wrong on the facts. Illegal immigrants won’t be included in this plan. Yes, some may break the law and obtain coverage illegally, but the legislation is not written to allow them to get taxpayer-financed coverage for anything other than emergency medical care (which is the current law). There are a lot of things to oppose in the legislation moving its way through Congress, but this isn’t one of them. Rep. Wilson showed himself to be both ignorant of how to act as a Representative and ignorant of the health care legislative proposals. No one opposed to this health care “reform” should hold him up as a hero.
An even more detailed analysis of the President’s misrepresentations can be found in an article by Matt Welch of Reason magazine.
Tags: Health care, President Obama
