In his C-SPAN interview with Steve Scully on Friday, President Obama said this:
I think the right option is to say, where are the game changers, the investments that we can make now that are going to reduce costs, even if they don’t reduce them this year or next year, but 10 years from now or 20 years from now, we are going to see substantially lower costs. And if – one of the very promising areas that we saw was these insurance companies, drug companies, hospitals, all these stakeholders coming together, committing to me that they would reduce costs by 1.5 percent per year. If we do that, it seems like [a] small number, we end up saving $2 trillion. $2 trillion, which not only can help deal with our deficit and our long-term debt, but a lot of those savings can go back into the pockets of American consumers in the form of lower premiums. That’s what we are driving for.
The trouble is, Obama’s account is not true. The New York Times has explained why:.”
Health care leaders who attended the meeting have a different interpretation. They say they agreed to slow health spending in a more gradual way and did not pledge specific year-by-year cuts. “There’s been a lot of misunderstanding that has caused a lot of consternation among our members,” said Richard J. Umbdenstock, the president of the American Hospital Association. “I’ve spent the better part of the last three days trying to deal with it.” Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform, said “the president misspoke” on Monday and again on Wednesday when he described the industry’s commitment in similar terms. After providing that account, Ms. DeParle called back about an hour later on Thursday and said: “I don’t think the president misspoke. His remarks correctly and accurately described the industry’s commitment.”
The Washington office of the American Hospital Association sent a bulletin to its state and local affiliates to “clarify several points” about the White House meeting.
In the bulletin, Richard J. Pollack, the executive vice president of the hospital association, said: “The A.H.A. did not commit to support the ‘Obama health plan’ or budget. No such reform plan exists at this time.” Moreover, Mr. Pollack wrote, “The groups did not support reducing the rate of health spending by 1.5 percentage points annually.” He and other health care executives said they had agreed to squeeze health spending so the annual rate of growth would eventually be 1.5 percentage points lower.
Later in the article we read that two lobbyists who participated in the meeting confirmed Pollack’s story.
Clearly the president did misspeak the first time. And obviously he and the White House know the claim that health care industries are going to reduce costs by 1.5 percent per year, rather than over 10 years, is not true. Yet Obama keeps insisting it is. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that Obama shares with Bill Clinton the tendency to routinely, almost promiscuously, use straw-men to strengthen his case. Last week I wrote that like Bill Clinton before him, Barack Obama employs smooth and persuasive words that, upon close inspection, are at odds with reality. Obama fancies himself a teller of inconvenient truths, a man who will admit to mistakes and whose words are trustworthy, who will speak up, rather than down, to the public. At a minimum, then, Obama should not continue to make claims he, and we, know to be false.
