From The Heritage Foundation:

This weekend President Obama dedicated his weekly address to defending Congress’s plans for an overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

He argued, “Once you’ve seen enough ads and heard enough people yelling on TV you might begin to wonder whether there’s a grain of truth to what they are saying.”

Here’s the truth, brand-new analysis from The Heritage Foundation — conducted by The Lewin Group— shows that the public plan component within the House Democrats’ health reform bill is in conflict with how the Congress and the President are selling their reform plan.

“If you like health your plan, you can keep it, the only thing that will change is that you’ll pay less.” Remember that? Well, according to the new Lewin study:

• 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, is there truth in the way the President and Congress are advertising their plans?

In his address President Obama asserted that, “If you like your current insurance, you keep that insurance. Period. End of Story.” But what the President forgot to tell you is that his assertion is only true if the story were fiction.

President Obama has stated that any plan he’d sign must include a health insurance exchange with a public “option”.

Governors Balk at Obama Health Plan

President Obama just got turned down by America’s governors. Obama wanted governors to endorse his proposed overhaul of health care, but ran into opposition over the runaway costs, as reported by The New York Times. Instead he got this:

Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, a Democrat, said he feared Congress was about to bestow “the mother of all unfunded mandates.”

“Medicaid is a poor vehicle for expanding coverage,’ added Mr. Bredesen, a former health care executive. “It’s a 45-year-old system originally designed for poor women and their children. It’s not health care reform to dump more money into Medicaid.”

Mr. Bredesen was far from alone in his concern. “As a governor, my concern is that if we try to cost-shift to the states we’re not going to be in a position to pick up the tab,” said Gov. Christine Gregoire of Washington, also a Democrat.

“I’m personally very concerned about the cost issue, particularly the $1 trillion figures being batted around,” said Gov. Bill Richardson, the New Mexico Democrat who served in the Clinton cabinet and ran for president against Mr. Obama.
Governors worry that Obama’s plan for a major expansion of Medicaid not only will break the bank in Washington, but also in the states—since they would be required to kick in part of the costs. That would worsen the multi-billion dollar shortfalls they already must address. Problems with the governors could be enormous for the White House. As The Heritage Foundation’s Dennis Smith wrote:

Congress and the Obama Administration are banking on using Medicaid to provide coverage to millions of uninsured Americans. As many as one-third of those who are uninsured could end up on Medicaid if it is expanded to 150 percent of the federal poverty level. . . . State opposition could be a tremendous blow to health care reform. Governors can be game-changers if they mobilize before momentum is built behind specific legislation that expands Medicaid.

 

Learn more truth about Obamacare.

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