House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) seemed to forget the role the health insurance industry played in crafting Obamacare Sunday morning during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press.
The former House speaker charged that Republicans want to repeal Obamcare because she thinks they are in the back pockets of the health insurance industry.
“It’s being the mouthpiece of the health insurance industry,” Pelosi said of the GOP. “We’re saying, ‘Let’s not have them be in charge anymore; let the people be in charge.”
However, evidence shows that the health insurance industry played a key role in passing the law, even devising the individual mandate, according to a recent report on Forbes.com.
When asked about the Supreme Court’s finding about the constitutionality of the individual mandate, Pelosi hedged as to whether she agreed with the finding that it amounted to a tax, after being asked by Meet the Press David Gregory.
“It’s a ta—; it’s a penalty for free riders,” Pelosi said, nearly calling it a tax before catching herself.
Pelosi told Gregory Republicans don’t have a prayer of repealing Obamacare and suggested that the law will reduce health care costs despite mounting evidence to the contrary, calling it “unrealistic.”
“We want to continue to lower costs, and we built that into the health care affordable care act, because one of the reasons to do the bill was because the cost of health care to individuals, to families, to businesses, no matter what their size, to local, state, and federal budgets and to our economy, the costs were unsustainable,” Pelosi said. “It’s a competitiveness issue for business and for our economy. so we had to take — come to a place where we lower the costs for all concerned and that we, again, take it down the path where we won to lower costs. ”
Democrats claimed that Obamacare would reduce premiums by $2,300 per family; however, the law has increased out-of-pocket costs by at least as much. The law also was estimated in March to cost $1.76 trillion over the next decade, much higher than the $940 billion the Congressional Budget Office estimated in March 2010.
