Obama's WMD Moment
Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them
For roughly the last seven years, Barack Obama and other members of the liberal left have asked "Where are the WMD"? The claim, of course, is that President Bush lead us into the Iraq war on a false claim. They say he fabricated the evidence to get us to follow his personal will for war with Iraq. The claims vary from settling a score over a failed Iraqi attempt to assassinate his father to the good old war for oil claims. It should be noted that Barack Obama was the only democrat candidate who had not supported the war, and he used this fact as a large part of a campaign to lead him to the Presidency. Now, he wishes to initiate health care reform. Republicans and Moderate Democrats need to learn a lesson from this little piece of history.
President Obama is using lies and distortions to push us down the road to Socialism, and the American people flat out don't want it. FactCheck.Org has reviewed the President's Prime Time News Conference and checked many of the claims he has made. Starting with his claim that the overhaul "will be paid for", they site the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
More access and broader coverage do not save money, however. Greater coverage will increase health spending. Unless major changes are successfully implemented in health care delivery and payment systems, costs will continue to rise from a larger base at a rapid pace. Moreover, potential savings are speculative, while costs are far more certain. That imbalance suggests that unless there is broad popular support for the measures that will be required to achieve savings, the nation’s health care bill could become that much more unaffordable.
This is a basic human understanding. When President Obama sites how we spend x out of y dollars on health care costs as a reason for the Federal Government to take over the system, understand what he is saying. Let's run with his number that 47 million Americans are without access to health care, and we are currently spending one out of every five dollars on health care. Understand that by adding in those 47 million people, the latter number doesn't go up. Those individuals who don't have health care are already figured into the GDP. Hence, it is insanity to claim that you can raise the number of people who have access to a system without raising the overall income of the people accessing the system and give the same quality health care without the cost per person going up.
Example. If your family has four people, and your current budget for food is $150 a week, then that is what it costs you to feed a family of four. If you have another child, you will then have to raise the amount you spend on food every week or you will have to reduce either the amount of food consumed by each person or the quality of the food offered. So when the 47 million uninsured are added into the system with the 253 million insured, the question becomes does President Obama intend to cut the amount of services available to you, or does he intend to spread the same amount of service that is currently available across a broader group? The third option is to raise the amount of money we spend in proportion with the number of people that we add to the system, but Obama has already declared that to be not an option.
But let us get at the notion that this Bill would cover all Americans. President Obama made the claim that "So the plan that has been – that I put forward and that what we're seeing in Congress would cover – the estimates are – at least 97 percent to 98 percent of Americans." The Congressional Budget Office disagrees with these numbers. They state that the Senate bill would leave 34 million people uninsured, and the House bill would leave 17 million in the same boat in 2019. This means that President Obama is rushing us to sign a Bill into law that takes ten years to cut the number of uninsured by potentially only 27%. Even in his best case scenario, it would only insure 63% of those currently uninsured.
President Obama also continued to use his fear mongering to lie about how his plan would save money. For example, he made the following claim.
And, in fact, there's going to be a whole lot of savings that we obtain from that because, for example, the average American family is paying thousands of dollars in hidden costs in their insurance premiums to pay for what's called uncompensated care – people who show up at the emergency room because they don't have a primary care physician.
This statement is based on a study that has been disputed , but even if one accepts the report, American families only pay $1,000 a year in extra premiums, not thousands as the President stated. The non partisan Kaiser Family Foundation released a study that they claim shows this cost is actually around $200 per family. But the lies to promote fear mongering didn't stop there. He also stated that Americans spend $6,000 more per person per year on health care than the other leading countries who are just as healthy. The actual number is $2,500.
Perhaps the only thing more disturbing than Obama's lies to promote fear were his lies to promote comfort. He made the following statement to try to reassure the average American that he is careful with their money and could be trusted to undertake such a venture.
I am very worried about federal spending. And the steps that we've taken so far have reduced federal spending over the next 10 years by $2.2 trillion.
The Congressional Budget Office numbers show how disgusting this lie really is. Not only is it not true that he has reduced federal spending by 2.2 trillion, he has raised spending by 3.6 trillion. This makes his statement nearly $5 trillion off.
As if the facts weren't enough to show that President Obama and his Administration can't be trusted with this venture, the lies scream "No". If the case for his plans can be made with facts, why tell lies? More importantly, if he is lying to make himself out to be fiscally responsible, this means that he is aware that a person who has not been fiscally responsible should never be in charge of our health care. While I am against any Government takeover of the private health care industry, this establishes that even if one supports such a move, Obama is not the right man for the job.
