Last week after White House Health Reform Office communications director Linda Douglass appeared in a webvideo purporting to refute claims that “the President intends to ‘eliminate’ private coverage”, we documented statements from Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein, and Noble Prize winning New York Times columnist Paul Krugman all directly contradicting Douglass’ claims.
Now, Verum Serum has flagged a “Fact Check“, from the Obama campaign itself, that also confirms President Barack Obama’s intent to eliminate private insurance coverage. The post is dated January 21, 2008, the height of Obama’s primary fight with Hillary Clinton, and begins:
Rhetoric: “Today, he opposes single payer health care, and attacks Sen. Clinton for proposing a plan that covers everyone”Reality: Obama Has Consistently Said That If We Were Starting From Scratch, He Would Support A Single Payer System, But Now We Need To Build On The System We Have
Later in the post, the Obama campaign offers up this quote from Obama himself to demonstrate Obama’s true support for single payer health care:
If I were designing a system from scratch I would probably set up a single-payer system…But we’re not designing a system from scratch…And when we had a health care forum before I set up my health care plan here in Iowa there was a lot of resistance to a single-payer system. So what I believe is we should set up a series of choices….Over time it may be that we end up transitioning to such a system.
Obamacare will “set up a series of choices” that “over time” will transition into a single payer/government-run health care system. That is how Obama defended his health care plan in the primaries. It is also the exact same reason conservatives have been accurately describing Obamacare as a Trojan Horse for government-run health care. Independent, non-partisan analysis from the Lewin Group backs up these facts:
- 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.
So was Obama misinforming Democratic primary voters in 2008? Or is he misinforming the American people now?