I've Been Skeptical Of Obama's "You Can Keep Your Health Insurance" Claim

I've Been Skeptical Of Obama's "You Can Keep Your Health Insurance" Claim

Ever since the press conference where a reporter asked a question about his "government option" being competitive with private insurance, and he gave one off those answers that suggested that either Obama hasn't a clue what predatory pricing (with taxpayer subsidy) is, or that he intends for the "government option" to drive private insurers out of business.

Some group called Naked Emperor News put together a collection of clips that certainly seems to show that Obama intends exactly that--but careful editing can do wonders for scrambling what someone really said. Context is everything--and the White House is now claiming that this collection misrepresents what he intends. (Although Democratic Congresscritters Jan Schakowsky and Barney Frank seem to be saying exactly that in that collection of clips.)

So here's a much longer clip of Obama in 2003 telling the SEIU that what he wants is single payer health insurance:

I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.

Now, maybe Obama has changed his mind since 2003 about this. Perhaps he has no intention of using government health insurance as a method of putting private insurers out of business. But with this history of support for single payer--and that a lot of single payer advocates are backing Obama's supposedly non-single payer plan--it's pretty obvious that either Obama has had a major change of heart along the way, or he's lying.

I don't have a problem with the government being the insurer of last resort. There are so many people already on some form of government health insurance that they could add the uninsured into one supersized pool and get enormous economies of scale: every government employee; every member of Congress; every Medicaid and Medicare recipient; every uninsured person. But if there is a subsidy of such a pool from general tax revenues, this is a serious problem.