Expert critiques President Obama's health care claims

Sep 23, 2010 / 22:52 pm

Commenting on the six month anniversary of the Senate passage of President Obama's health care bill on Sept. 23, Population Research Institute (PRI) president Steve Mosher critiqued the legislation, asserting that much of what the president has claimed about the bill is simply “not true.”

“Today is the six-month anniversary of the passage of President Obama's signature legislation, what has come to be known as ObamaCare,” Mosher began in his organization's Weekly Briefing on Thursday. “The White House is feting this semi-anniversary, but few Americans are in a mood to join the celebration.”

The PRI president added that “the more Americans find out what is actually in this monstrosity of a bill, the less they like it. Polls conducted by Rasmussen Reports show that 55 percent of the public supported the repeal of ObamaCare on March 25, just two days after its passage.”

“Today, a half-year later, the number of those favoring repeal has grown to 61 percent.”

“I am not one to call the President a liar,” Mosher said. “But I do believe that much of what Obama has said about his own health care bill is simply not true. He claimed in Maine that people could keep their own health insurance, in Maryland that people could keep their own doctors.”

“In Washington, DC, he promised that his plan would cut costs but would not lead to the rationing of care. He has consistently claimed that it would not fund abortions, and that its 'end-of-life visits' would not lead to euthanasia.”

However, six months later, “all of these claims are being questioned by taxpayers who see people losing their health care plans and paying more for health insurance,” Mosher noted. “More and more Americans are realizing that they and their children will be stuck with the bill as healthcare costs rise, and that they will be paying for 'family planning services' that include not just sterilizations and contraception, but abortions as well.”

Mosher continued to add that the “elderly will bear the brunt of Obama's deceptions, such as his claim that 'If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,'” as said by the president on June 8 of this year.

“The reality is that doctors are already fleeing Medicare in droves,” he asserted. “In Texas alone, more than 300 primary care physicians have stopped seeing seniors in the last two years. When ObamaCare cuts Medicare payments to doctors next year, even more doctors will bail out of a system that overworks and underpays them, leaving millions of seniors without a personal physician.”

Mosher went on to say that the “easiest Obama claim to refute is his contention that ObamaCare would not fund abortions. This is because he refuted it himself by issuing an executive order explicitly forbidding the funding of abortions through ObamaCare.”

“When I first learned of this particular ruse, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry,” Mosher said, adding that if  “ObamaCare had not funded abortion in the first place, then his executive order would be unnecessary. So the executive order constitutes evidence that, contra Obama, ObamaCare had funded abortion all along.”

Since “federal law always and everywhere trumps executive orders, Obama's order is not worth the paper it is written on,” he said.  “As a Harvard-trained lawyer, the President surely realizes that his executive order will not stand up to the most cursory of judicial reviews.”

Concluding his remarks, Mosher said that is “seems to me that our choice as Americans is simple: Either we euthanize ObamaCare before it is too late, or it winds up euthanizing us.”