President Obama’s address to Congress and the nation Wednesday evening was yet another illustration of his seemingly endless ability to soar to genuinely impressive rhetorical heights without ever landing back on truthful ground. Nothing better illustrates this than Obama’s medical malpractice “demonstration project” gambit. Here’s the essential fact about federal demonstration projects – they are nothing more than a dodge, a deceitful way for Washington politicians to appear as if they are doing something concrete when in reality they’re tucking the idea at hand safely out of sight over in a corner. Obama might as well have said Wednesday night that he will appoint a presidential commission or have challenged Congress to create an emergency national task force on medical malpractice. The Democratic majority sitting in the House chamber would have stomped and clapped and yelled with equal delight, knowing the chief executive had just consigned medical malpractice caps to irrelevance, along with any GOP senator or representative gullible enough to think Obama was thus doing anything other than playing them for suckers.
So it was throughout this 47- minute nationally televised monument to presidential flimflam. Sometimes the prevarications were so obvious that even the president’s most ardent supporters – like the news staff of The New York Times – had to concede that he was playing fast and loose with the facts. For instance, the Times quoted Obama’s repeating of his familiar claim that “if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance, nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.”
“That is technically true,” the Times carefully admitted, “but there is a real possibility that existing policies could change as a result of the legislation. The government, for instance, would set new standards, and employers that already offer insurance would have to bring their plans into compliance.” In other words, when, as is inevitable, the cost of providing health insurance is more than the federal fine Obama seeks for not providing it, companies will drop their employee plans, forcing millions of people into the government-run health care system against their will.
Similarly, Obama claimed “most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system, a system that is currently full of waste and abuse.” If $675 billion equals “most” of the $900 billion Obama says his proposal would cost, why wait to get those savings? Finally, there is abortion and illegal immigrants. Obama said “no federal dollars” will fund abortions under his proposal and “the reforms I am proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.” If Obama truly believes that, then he will have no objection when Democrats in Congress reverse their previous votes barring such provisions from the legislation when they were proposed by Republicans. In short, did the president sleep through August?
