BuckeyeBlog

In 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.

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In Cincinnati yesterday, President Obama made this astounding claim about those who oppose his health care “reform” plan: “I’ve got a question for all those folks: What are you going to do? What’s your answer? What’s your solution? And you know what? They don’t have one.”

You’d think the President would do a little research before speaking, since what he said was 100% false. There are plenty of ideas out there from those of us who oppose his plan. Peter Suderman over at Reason magazine does the president’s job for him and lists some of the solutions Obama says don’t exist.

In a conference call with religious leaders, President Obama said there was a lot of misinformation in the health care debate. That’s true. Of course, much of that misinformation is coming from him. As Michael Tanner points out in the Orange County Register, the claim that people will be able to keep their insurance if they like it just isn’t true:

…under Section 59(B)(a) of HR3200, the bill making its way through the House, and Section 151 of the bill that passed out of a Senate committee, every American would be required to buy health insurance.

And not just any insurance: to qualify, a plan would have to meet certain government-defined standards. For example, under Section 122(b) of the House bill, all plans must cover hospitalization; outpatient hospital and clinic services; services by physicians and other health professionals, as well as supplies and equipment incidental to their services; prescription drugs, rehabilitation services, mental health and substance-abuse treatment; preventive services (to be determined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the United States Preventive Services Task Force); and maternity, well-baby, and well-child care, as well as dental, vision, and hearing services for children under age 21….

If your current health insurance doesn’t meet all those requirements, you won’t be immediately forced to drop your current insurance for a government-specified plan. But you would be required to switch if you lose your current insurance or “if significant changes are made to the existing health insurance plan.”…

Seniors, too, could lose their current coverage, at least the 10.2 million seniors currently participating in the Medicare advantage program. That program offers many seniors benefits not included in traditional Medicare, including preventive-care services, coordinated care for chronic conditions, routine physical examinations, additional hospitalization, skilled nursing facility stays, routine eye and hearing examinations, and glasses and hearing aids But the House bill cuts payments to the Medicare Advantage program by roughly $156.3 billion over 10 years.

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President Obama has said that under his health care reform, “if you like your doctor, you keep your doctor.” While President Obama wants to create a new government-run “insurance” program, there are already government-run health care programs for the poor and elderly. Perhaps the President is unaware of it, but in one of these programs, Medicaid, some patients are having to sue the government in order to keep their own doctors:

Some desperate patients went to court in Hamilton County Monday, begging a judge for help.

They say the state won’t let them see their longtime doctors anymore.

The patients are so sick, they’re in the state’s Medicaid program for the aged, blind and disabled.

They’ve sued to keep their Health Alliance doctors and hospitals after the state’s Medicaid provider, Buckeye Insurance, dropped the Health Alliance in April.

If the government is already forcing people in government health care to choose new doctors, can we really believe that this will change under a new government health care program?

Time to ready the life rafts.  See our “Presuming Liberty: Using Ohio’s Constitution to Limit Government.”

Add one dose of flawed thinking on taxes, another dose of misplaced outrage at “outsourcing,” some nifty Presidential rhetoric about “tax havens,” and what do you get? A Presidential tax plan that, as the Cato Institute’s Dan Miller observes, will hurt American businesses and provide a boon to foreign companies: