"Here's a guarantee that I've made: If you have insurance that you like, then you will be able to keep that insurance. If you've got a doctor that you like, you will be able to keep your doctor."
This is an exact quote from President Obama's AARP meeting on Tuesday. The transcript is here. But a transcript shouldn't be necessary. The president has made the same detailed and absolute assurance on a half dozen occasions in the past few weeks. Only once was he pressed on it, by ABC's increasingly head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest-of-the-White-House-correspondents Jake Tapper, and the president deflected the question and quickly moved on.
The president has to flee from questions about these twin assurances that he routinely gives because they are not true. Have never been true. Cannot be made true.
Obamacare guarantees that tens of millions of Americans will see their insurance plan change as tens of thousands of employers evaluate the new post-radical rewrite health laws and determine that the so called "government option/public plan" makes more financial sense for them. Those tens of millions of employees will find themselves in a new insurance plan with new rules about what is and isn't covered, and new doctors in new networks. It will be up to the doctors to decide whether to accept patients with the new coverage, and as many have said on my program over this week and the month before it, they don't know if they will or not because they don't know the details of the pay schedules. Many doctors already refuse or limit the number of Medicare patients they accept because of low reimbursement rates. If doctors cannot pay their bills by seeing government plan patients, they won't see them.
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And it isn't known yet what basic services the government plan will cover. Rationing systems such as those of Canada, Great Britain and Sweden deny many forms of treatment to elderly patients that private American insurance covers. Read this account from my friend Tim who has survived bladder cancer about the difference in treatment regimens here in the U.S. and abroad, differences based in cost-containment.
Then study this chart of Obamacare prepared by the GOP staff on the Joint Economic Committee. The RNC should make a t-shirt out of this and distribute for $5 during the August recess. This is your future if Obamacare passes.
The president's pitch for his radical makeover of American medicine is built on a big lie of "you get to keep what you have." Incredibly the MSM stands aside and lets him make this outrageous claim again and again, even though it has the effect of defrauding every single voter who hears it unchallenged. I asked Howard Kurtz about the comatose state of the MSM, and his defense of the Beltway press gaggle was necessarily tepid. It had to be. The press corps is along for the ride and refuses to ask even the most obvious questions about the president's whopper.
Which means voters will have to do the asking, at every "townhall" and district meeting with a Congressman or a senator. E-mail the various offices and ask if your coverage --the same coverage and the same doctors at the same rate-- is "guaranteed." Demand to know how such an obviously untrue promise can be made again and again by the president when the government plan will fill up with millions of Americans being pushed down a slide. Only if the public grasps the enormity of the changes aimed at their health care and their doctors will they in turn demand that their representatives and senators stop this rush off an Obama cliff.
The "Free Our Health Care Petition" will cross 900,000 signatures by July's end and quickly make the 1,000,000 goal we had hope to make by the time Congress left town. It is an exhibit in every meeting with a Congressman or senator ahead --a million people saying "no" to Obamacare who hadn't begun to come together even three weeks ago. Please join the effort and please find your congressman and senator while they are back in the district and tell them that you don't believe the president's obviously false "guarantees" and that you want Obamacare defeated and defeated quickly so real and focused reforms can be brought forward.
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