Real Myths

Here are the most annoying myths propagated by President Obama in the debate over healthcare reform:

---"My plan says......"--- uhhh, Mr. President, you don't have a plan, the Senate and House have ones. Obama never delineates between his ideas on reform and the pure facts in the legislation. If he was like Hillary Clinton in 1993, he could make those statements because he would have wrote a plan. In reality, it's dishonest for him to say anything about "his" plan until he either drafts one, or has it on his desk.

--- "'My' plan is about competition... there isn't any now"--- The notion that a private market which includes over 1,300 competitors isn't competitive enough is laughable. Also laughable is the idea that another competitor that operates like the umpires on a baseball diamond, while participating in the game isn't creating a better market, it's destroying it. The real problem is that the market is chopped off into 50 small markets that discourage competition. We need to allow insurance selling across state lines. That is how you spur more competition.

---"We must stop the discrimination of people with preexisting conditions..."--- This might be unpopular to defend, but let me explain... should you be allowed to buy life insurance when you have a terminal illness? Can you get car insurance after you total your car? No. The reason why is that the very point of insurance is a risk pool where the prices go up and down based on the risk on the whole pool. If you ban the "discrimination" of preexisting conditions, you end up dramatically increasing the risk in those pools. That in turn makes the price skyrocket for everyone.

---"My plan won't cover illegal immigrants..."--- Well, the House bill expressively covers them and they are always included in the "47 million" that don't have coverage. They don't deserve health insurance because they aren't citizens. Emergency care yes, anything else, no.

---"We can't allow 47 million Americans to be without health insurance... it'll break the budget..."--- First, the real number of Americans who are Americans and are simply too poor for health insurance is about 10-15 million. Two, the line that the budget will bust if we do nothing on healthcare was exactly what President Clinton said in 1994. We were coming out of economic hardship and he claimed we would never grow unless we reformed healthcare. That's funny because it's the very Democrats that now take credit for the 90's/Clinton boom, when it undermined his own argument for reform of healthcare. We can do a number of things to positively reform healthcare but simply put: it's not a "crisis".

One more...

---"There are no 'death panels' in the bill"--- First I'd like to once again congratulate Sarah Palin for totally changing the debate on healthcare from Facebook. She once again lured the left into a trap of linguistics. But to the point, Palin's quote of "death panels" was never a statement of fact in any congressional bill. It was a metaphor for what would inevadably uldhappen under a public plan turned single payer. The government will have to ration care and it's safe for Gov. Palin to assume that a special needs baby or an elderly person would be near the top of the cost cutting. So, no, there isn't a death panel "in the bill"-nobody believed that anyway- Palin just extrapolated down the road a bit to the looming panel that very well might sentence "non cost effective" members of society to death.

So let's keep spreading the real facts and bust the real myths...