Obama Not Familiar With House Heath Care Reform Bill

This from the Heritage Foundation.

Morning Bell: Obama Admits He’s “Not Familiar” With House Bill (7/21/09 The Foundry @ the Heritage Foundation) [emphasis is mine]

"With the public’s trust in his handling of health care tanking (50%-44% of Americans disapprove), the White House has launched a new phase of its strategy designed to pass Obamacare: all Obama, all the time. As part of that effort, Obama hosted a conference call with leftist bloggers urging them to pressure Congress to pass his health plan as soon as possible.

"During the call, a blogger from Maine said he kept running into an Investors Business Daily article that claimed Section 102 of the House health legislation would outlaw private insurance. He asked: “Is this true? Will people be able to keep their insurance and will insurers be able to write new policies even though H.R. 3200 is passed?” President Obama replied: “You know, I have to say that I am not familiar with the provision you are talking about.” (quote begins at 17:10)

"This is a truly disturbing admission by the President, especially considering that later in the call, Obama promises yet again: “If you have health insurance, and you like it, and you have a doctor that you like, then you can keep it. Period.” How can Obama keep making this promise if he is not familiar with the health legislation that is being written in Congress? Details matter.

"We are familiar with the passage IBD sites, and as we wrote last week, the House bill does not outright outlaw private individual health insurance, but it does effectively regulate it out of existence."

This blog covered the issue of private insurance under H.R. 3200 in this post last Saturday, with the actual text of the sections in question. As the Heritage Foundation says, the bill will effectively kill the private health insurance industry with cumbersome new regulations and restrictions and raise the cost to employers and individuals.

And the President, who's clearly back in the campaign mode to sell this piece of monstrocity, doesn't even know what's in it. He probably doesn't know that Congress will be exempt from the very rules that they are crafting right now.

According to the Heritage Foundation, the bill will:

• Approximately 103 million people would be covered under the new public plan and, as a consequence, about 83.4 million people would lose their private insurance. This would represent a 48.4 percent reduction in the number of people with private coverage.
• About 88.1 million workers would see their current private, employer-sponsored health plan go away and would be shifted to the public plan.
• Yearly premiums for the typical American with private coverage could go up by as much as $460 per privately-insured person, as a result of increased cost-shifting stemming from a public plan modeled on Medicare.

And remember that the bill wants to penalize people who don't have health insurance by taxing them on their gross income.

Has the whole country gone crazy or what?

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