You Mislead! Fact-Checking Obama [A Dossier of Deception!]

National Review ^ | September 28, 2009

[Steelfish]

September 28, 2009

You Mislead! Fact-Checking Obama.

Michael F. Cannon and Ramesh Ponnuru.

It is a good thing that other congressmen did not follow Rep. Joe Wilson’s lead. If they yelled out every time President Obama said something untrue about health care, they would quickly find themselves growing hoarse.

By our count, the president made more than 20 inaccurate claims in his speech to Congress. We have excluded several comments that are deeply misleading but not outright false. (For example: Obama pledged not to tap the Medicare trust fund to pay for reform. But there is no money in that “trust fund,” anyway, so the pledge is meaningless.) Even so, we may have missed one or more false statements by the president.

Our failure to include one of his comments in the following list should not be taken to constitute an endorsement of its accuracy, let alone wisdom.

1. “Buying insurance on your own costs you three times as much as the coverage you get from your employer.” The Congressional Budget Office writes, “Premiums for policies purchased in the individual insurance market are, on average, much lower — about one-third lower for single coverage and one-half lower for family policies.”

It is true that individual insurance policies are generally 30 percent less comprehensive than employer-provided insurance, and comparable individual policies are about twice as expensive. But much of the extra cost is a function of the tax penalty on purchasing such insurance and the stunted market that penalty has yielded.

2. “There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage.”An outright falsehood, whether you use the president’s noncitizen-free estimate or the standard, questionable estimate of 46 million uninsured residents.

A study prepared for the federal government estimates that 9 million people counted as “uninsured”....

[Jeff Head]

[Cicero]

Well, hardly a surprise. And most, if not all, of these claims appear to be deliberate lies.

Maybe it’s not “nice” to say that Obama is a liar. But it is a fact.

Indeed, he lies or misrepresents virtually every time he opens his mouth.

[Kartographer]

[ANGGAPO]

Obama is a master at weasel-wording his statements. At the end of the day there will be only Government managed health care, or the Public Option as he says. Personnel health insurance will cost so much that no employer will be able to afford it and stay in business. And slowly, by hook or crook, everyone, except congress, will be forced into a Public Option provided by the remains of Medicare. Then we will be able to toss Grand Paw under the bus.