Obama Misleads Nevadans on Health Care
17 January 2008 9:30 am by Taylor Marsh
Obama Misleads Nevadans on Health Care
reported from Las Vegas, Nevada
As I said yesterday in my piece about Obama’s union surrogates and voter intimidation, things are getting rough in Nevada.
Obama is running two ads in Nevada, which you
can see here. The ad above is a continuation of the abject untruths Mr.
Obama is using to sell people on his health care plan, which started quite a
while ago. As we’ve gone through before, Obama’s plan is not “universal”
health care, because it leaves 15 million people out of the package.
From
the New American Century:
In particular, a sizeable share of the uninsured are higher income individuals
who could afford to pay the full cost of a health insurance plan, or any fraction
of it, but choose not to. As a result, any plan to increase insurance coverage
in the U.S. that does not include a requirement to purchase or acquire insurance
will not result in universal health insurance coverage. Recent estimates suggest
that a plan with uniform generous subsidies but without a mandate would cover
no more than one-half of the uninsured in the U.S. Even with other
cost-saving measures and a child mandate, we think that it is very likely
that at least 15 million Americans would remain uninsured.
From Jonathan
Holohan who directs the Urban Institute:
Still, for the purists out there is always somebody like John Holohan, who
directs the Urban Institute’s Health Research Center and, as best as I can
tell, has no direct connection to the presidential campaign. Holohan commands
universal respect, too, having worked on these sorts of problems for two decades.
And he’s pretty much where Gruber and Nichols are on this question. Without
a mandate, he told me, “Obama would still leave about 22 million, 23
million, but he has a mandate for children, about 9 million uninsured kids,
so assuming you get most of them, you get pretty close to 15 million.”
 |
| via Fact Hub |
Back in December the Concord Monitor published the following (h/t FH): “Jonathan
Gruber, a health economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who worked
on the Massachusetts plan, said a mandate means “the difference between
universal or near-universal coverage. Obama would have a large expansion, better
than anything the Republicans have, but not universal coverage,” Gruber
said. “You can’t get it without a mandate; it’s just not possible.”
Gruber estimated that 15 million people would remain uninsured under Obama’s
plan.”
The Wall Street Journal weighed in, confirming that “outside
experts” agree that Obama’s plan leaving out 15 million is indeed “in
the ballpark,” as the above information confirms, with the Washington Post
running articles in the same vein over the last months.
Edwards’s approach is preferable to Obama’s because it is less susceptible to being undermined by the cost-shifting created when the uninsured end up being treated at emergency rooms. Mr. Obama argues that the problem of the uninsured is mostly a matter of affordability, in which case solving the price problem would do the trick. If not, he says, a mandate could come later, when costs have been driven down enough to make it fair. Still, the Obama plan could leave a third of those currently uninsured lacking coverage.
Maybe you don’t believe in mandates. But the truth is that Obama is not telling
the truth about his plan in his Nevada ads. He absolutely does not offer “universal”
health care. This is simply a fact.
Clinton and Edwards offer the closest thing to “universal” health care, with Obama a distant third. The simple truth is that only a single payer system will get everyone in the system, but nobody thinks that is feasible or doable or even affordable. So in lieu of that, if you care about having “universal” health care, it’s either Clinton or Edwards, because regardless of Obama’s misleading spin, his plan won’t get the job done.
