Morning Bell: Obama’s Other Broken Health Care Promises

Conn Carroll / January 06, 2010

When Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) emerged from a closed-door meeting with top House Democratic leaders yesterday, the press asked her about C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb’s request that she permit cameras to televise the final health care negotiations between the House and Senate. After Pelosi first demurred, a reporter reminded Pelosi about President Barack Obama’s frequent promises to the American people throughout 2008 that he would ensure C-SPAN was allowed to televise exactly such negotiations, to which Speaker Pelosi quipped: “There are a number of things he was for on the campaign trail.”

Speaker Pelosi is right: President Obama’s broken health care promises are legendary. According to reports, Speaker Pelosi wasn’t even referring to Obama’s whopper from last month that he never campaigned on the public option. No, Speaker Pelosi is apparently most upset with Obama’s support for the Senate’s tax on high cost health plans, which she believes is a violation of Obama’s promise not to raise taxes on the middle class. But really, President Obama’s current health care plan breaks so many of his previous health care promises, there is no need for Pelosi to have to name just one. Here are just some of the other major promises President Barack Obama has broken:

Individual Mandate: There were not a lot of actual policy fights in the 2008 Democratic Presidential primary, but one of the few major policy disagreements between then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) was over the individual mandate. Clinton was for it and Obama was against it. On January 31, 2008, Obama made the case against mandates in a Los Angeles, CA, debate: “Now, under any mandate, you are going to have problems with people who don’t end up having health coverage. I think we can anticipate that there would also be people potentially who are not covered and are actually hurt if they have a mandate imposed on them.” Both the House and Senate bills now contain an individual mandate. According to the President’s own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, under the Senate plan, 19 million Americans would pay $29 billion in taxes/fines and still receive no health care in return. (more…)