Obama Overstating Health Savings
Obama is getting into a bad habit of extremely over exaggerating what he is accomplishing.
This week it was with health care savings. Obama had a huge press conference, stating he had made a tremendous cost saving deal with health care providers, that would save $2 trillion over the next 10 years.
Only one problem: It does not appear to be true.
The president of the American Hospital Association said Thursday that a deal with the White House to cut the growth in health care spending has been “spun way away from the original intent.”
President Barack Obama described the agreement this week with six major health care organizations as a “watershed event,” hailing what the White House said was their promise to reduce spending by 1.5 percentage points annually for a decade, which he said could save as much as $2 trillion over that span.
But in a conference call Thursday, President Richard Umbdenstock told 230 member organizations that the agreement had been misrepresented. The groups, he said, had agreed to gradually ramp up to the 1.5 percentage-point target over 10 years – not to reduce spending by that much in each of the 10 years.
“There has been a tremendous amount of confusion and frankly a lot of political spin,” Umbdenstock said on the call. “And I want to assure you that the American Hospital Association is at the table and a responsible part of this, but that we’ve been very clear on what we have committed to.”
So in other words, the President stated that these providers would decrease spending by 1.5% annually. What they were actually promising is to get to a point, within a decade, where they could save 1.5% annually. And that is not from a baseline, mind you; that is a cost savings of 1.5% from the predicted spending 10 years from now. The cost savings is more in line with around $200 billion over 10 years, or 1/10 what Obama stated it would be.
This was clearly a political move, pure and simple. Obama assumed no one would look too closely at this deal. Problem was, in this day and age, everything is looked at closely. These kind of misstatements are not helpful in the long term debate on health care reform, because much of the public is already wary of the lack of honesty from Washington. Obama is quickly joining the beltway crowd on exaggeration and lack of transparency.
Please see my comments on health care reform here.
Typical politician…Democrat, Republican they are all the same. You can never get the real truth out of them. Every government program or idea is always made to look good but in the end we pay and we pay dearly. The lastest was the hope and change thing…What we got was just another politician with an agenda that will say anything to get elected. That is what it is about..getting elected…Once in you can do as you please and tell your supporters to screw off..
When will we learn that both parties are corrupt and lying…We will never see a real hope and change till you break the 2 party rule… But hey, Obama talks well and can even lie with the best of them in Washington to get over on the people…I am still waiting for them to fix social security that they mis managed and took all the fund money and spent on other thing…I wonder what they will do when they get to manage my health care…Probably the same with everything else Washington does…a total nightmare….I am still looking for one program that Washington runs that actually works as planned.
Well I voted for Obama and I think I made a mistake. I can see now that he is just another politician they cannot tell the truth. I wonder if they do not teach truth at Harvard. What got me was his treasury secretary Geitner that was not paying his taxes. He became the head of the IRS for not paying taxes. I would end up in jail for the same thing.SO much for the hope and change I was looking for. Next election I am looking at a 3rd party. I have had enough of the elephants and mules. I want an honest truthful person myself.