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In his most recent weekly radio address, President Barack Obama denounced "willful misrepresentations and outright distortions" in the debate over health care reform. He then went on to repeat one of the most outright distortions in the entire debate: "If you like your private health insurance plan, you can keep your plan. Period."

No, Mr. President. No you can't.

To go straight to the chapter and verse: under Section 59(B)(a) of HR3200, the bill making its way through the House, and Section 151 of the bill that passed out of a Senate committee, every American would be required to buy health insurance.

It is time for the president to stop spreading this particular 'willful misrepresentation and outright distortion.'

And not just any insurance: to qualify, a plan would have to meet certain government-defined standards. For example, under Section 122(b) of the House bill, all plans must cover hospitalization; outpatient hospital and clinic services; services by physicians and other health professionals, as well as supplies and equipment incidental to their services; prescription drugs, rehabilitation services, mental health and substance-abuse treatment; preventive services (to be determined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the United States Preventive Services Task Force); and maternity, well-baby, and well-child care, as well as dental, vision, and hearing services for children under age 21.

But that's not all. Section 1239(b) of the bill also establishes a federal Health Benefits Advisory Committee, headed by the U.S. surgeon general, which will have the power to develop additional minimum benefit requirements. There is no limit to how extensive those future required benefits may be.

If your current health insurance doesn't meet all those requirements, you won't be immediately forced to drop your current insurance for a government-specified plan. But you would be required to switch if you lose your current insurance or "if significant changes are made to the existing health insurance plan."

More critically, for the 70 percent of us who get our insurance through work, those plans would all have to satisfy the government's benefit requirements within five years.

More likely, your employer will simply find that the increased cost and administrative burden is not worth it, and will dump you into the government-run "public option."

The Lewin Group, an independent actuarial firm, estimates that under the House version of the bill, as many as 89.5 million workers will simply lose their current employer-provided plan and be forced into government-run insurance.

Abortion: Which Side Is Fabricating?

Despite what Obama said, the House bill would allow abortions to be covered by a federal plan and by federally subsidized private plans.

August 21, 2009

Updated: August 25, 2009


Summary

Will health care legislation mean "government funding of abortion"?

President Obama said Wednesday that’s "not true" and among several "fabrications" being spread by "people who are bearing false witness." But abortion foes say it’s the president who’s making a false claim. "President Obama today brazenly misrepresented the abortion-related component" of health care legislation, said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee. So which side is right?

The truth is that bills now before Congress don’t require federal money to be used for supporting abortion coverage. So the president is right to that limited extent. But it’s equally true that House and Senate legislation would allow a new "public" insurance plan to cover abortions, despite language added to the House bill that technically forbids using public funds to pay for them. Obama has said in the past that "reproductive services" would be covered by his public plan, so it’s likely that any new federal insurance plan would cover abortion unless Congress expressly prohibits that. Low- and moderate-income persons who would choose the "public plan" would qualify for federal subsidies to purchase it. Private plans that cover abortion also could be purchased with the help of federal subsidies. Therefore, we judge that the president goes too far when he calls the statements that government would be funding abortions "fabrications."


Analysis

Obama’s "Fabrications" Remark

Obama’s remarks Wednesday came during a telephone conference call to thousands of listeners, organized by religious organizations supporting his health care proposals. He said that "there has been a lot of misinformation in this debate, and there are some folks out there who are frankly bearing false witness." And then he lumped in abortion coverage at the end of a list of claims that he branded as untrue:

Obama, Aug. 19: We are closer to achieving that reform than we have ever been. And that’s why we’re seeing some of the divisive and deceptive attacks. You’ve heard some of them. Ludicrous ideas. Let me just give you one example, this notion that we are somehow setting up "death panels" that would decide on whether elderly people get to live or die. That is just an extraordinary lie. This is based on a provision in the House legislation that would allow Medicare to reimburse you if you wanted counseling on how to set up a living will or other end of life decisions. Entirely voluntary, it gives you an option that people who can afford fancy lawyers already exercise. That’s the kind of distortion that we’ve been hearing too much of out here.

We’ve heard that this is all designed to provide health insurance to illegal aliens. That’s not true. There’s a specific provision in the bill that does not provide health insurance for those individuals. You’ve heard that there’s a government takeover of health care. That’s not true. You’ve heard that this is all going to mean government funding of abortion. Not true. This is all, these are all fabrications that have been put out there in order to discourage people from meeting what I consider to be a core ethical and moral obligation, and that is that we look out for one another, that I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper. And in the wealthiest nation on earth right now, we are neglecting to live up to that call.

The White House did not post any transcript of the president’s words, but sponsors of the conference call, a coalition of faith-based groups supporting an overhaul of the health insurance system, posted the full audio of the president’s call on its Web site. His words come near the very end of the recording, and we transcribed them from the recording.

Abortion foes quickly denounced Obama’s statement as untrue. The NRLC’s Johnson said "the bill backed by the White House (H.R. 3200) explicitly authorizes the government plan to cover all elective abortions." And our analysis shows that Johnson’s statement is correct. Though we of course take no position on whether the legislation should allow or not allow coverage for abortions, the House bill does just that.

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Critics are wrongly claiming that the public plan is like Medicaid, and saying that if the public plan covers abortion, that is the same as taxpayer funded abortions. That is inaccurate, since the public plan operates just like a private plan. It would be funded and paid for by private individual premiums.

Two examples also highlight the distinction between abortion coverage and taxpayer funding of abortion.

One: Currently companies get a tax break on employer based insurance, the majority of which cover abortions, but people don’t think that is taxpayer funding of abortion.

Two: The tax credit for health insurance is analogous to Pell grants that college students receive that they can use at the college of their choice. If a student uses the Pell grant at a Catholic college, people don’t think that is the government subsidizing the Catholic college.