Obama's Health Care Speech: A Furious Fusillade of Lies

Live-blogging President Obama's 'Hail Mary' pass to try and save socialized medicine: the lies are coming so fast and so furious, I'm having a hard time keeping up. The most outrageous fabrications:

On the 'public option' (socialized medicine): "Despite all this, the insurance companies and their allies don't like this idea. They argue that these private companies can't fairly compete with the government. And they'd be right if taxpayers were subsidizing this public insurance option. But they won't be. I have insisted that like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects. But by avoiding some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits, excessive administrative costs and executive salaries, it could provide a good deal for consumers."

Lie: The federal government already bankrupted Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Post Office, the nationalized auto companies, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the FHA, the FDIC, Amtrak and the like. Trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars in the red. Debts that must be paid by our children and grandchildren, born into the world owing tens of thousands of dollars to a collectivist, Utopian vision that can never be realized.

On how to pay for socialized medicine: "Here's what you need to know. First, I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. Period. And to prove that I'm serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don't materialize."

Lie: Every serious analysis, including those performed by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, describes adding two trillion more dollars to the deficit to pay for this debacle. We don't have the money. How in the hell can anyone believe that we'll add "47 million uninsureds" to the pool while not adding costs? It's nonsensical.

On not slashing Medicare: "In fact, I want to speak directly to America's seniors for a moment, because Medicare is another issue that's been subjected to demagoguery and distortion during the course of this debate... More than four decades ago, this nation stood up for the principle that after a lifetime of hard work, our seniors should not be left to struggle with a pile of medical bills in their later years. That is how Medicare was born. And it remains a sacred trust that must be passed down from one generation to the next. That is why not a dollar of the Medicare trust fund will be used to pay for this plan."

Lie: News articles describe one-half trillion dollars in Medicare cuts: "The health care bill making its way through the House would save an estimated $500 billion in Medicare over the next 10 years."

On Covering Illegal Immigrants: "There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false – the reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally."

Lie: Reuters reports otherwise: "While the bill states that illegal immigrants are not eligible for the new taxpayer-funded affordability credits, there is nothing in the bill to enforce this provision. Congress defeated efforts to require the use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program. More than 70 other programs of this kind use SAVE.

Obama's masterful speechifying is overshadowed by his radical ideology; the resulting fabrications would be humorous were the stakes not so high.



Update: Dan Riehl was live-blogging using only pithy one-liners.