Obama Defends Baucus Bill

Yesterday, President Obama appeared on five Sunday morning talk shows, fielding questions that predominantly focused on health care, the war in Afghanistan, and race. Obama defended the Senate Finance Committee’sAmerica’s Healthy Future Act of 2009 from bipartisan criticism, insisting that “it provides health insurance to people who don’t have it at affordable prices.” “I’d like to make sure that we’ve got that affordability really buttoned down, because I think that’s one of the most important things, is that if we’re offering people health insurance and we’re saying that people have to get health insurance if it’s affordable, we’ve got to make sure it’s affordable,” Obama said, replying to Democrats who are hoping to boost the bill’s affordability measures during this week’s upcoming committee mark-up process. Throughout the interviews, Obama defended the committee’s decision to tax insurers that provide so-called “Cadillac health plans,” the individual requirement to purchase health care coverage, and the bill’s verification requirements to prevent undocumented workers from purchasing health coverage.

TAXING ‘CADILLAC HEALTH CARE PLANS’: On Tuesday, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) criticized Sen. Max Baucus’ (D-MT) bill for imposing “a 35% excise tax on insurance companies” that sell plans valued at more than $21,000 for family coverage, or $8,000 for individual coverage. “Now that raises $200 billion, so I understand the temptation,” Rockefeller explained, “[but] every single coal miner is going to have a big big tax put on them because the tax will be put on the company, the company will immediately pass it down in lower benefits…and probably higher premiums to coal miners who are getting very good health care benefits for a very good reason and that’s because like steel workers and others, they are doing about the most dangerous job that can be done in America[and are therefore expensive to insure]. So that’s not a very smart idea, in fact it’s a very dangerous idea.” During his interview with CNN’s John King, Obama insisted that the bill would move towards “using our health dollars wisely” and protecting the benefits of high-risk workers. “I’ve been talking to the unions about it. I’ve been honest with them about it. What I’ve said is, is that the — we want to make sure that guys are protected, guys and gals who have got a good benefit,that they are protected, but we also want to make sure that we’re using our health dollars wisely.” “I do think that giving a disincentive to insurance companies to offer Cadillac plans that don’t make people healthier is part of the way that we’re going to bring down health care costs for everybody over the long term,” he added. On Saturday, Sens. Rockefeller, John Kerry (D-MA), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) introduced an amendment to the Baucus bill that would exempt workers in high risk professions from the excise tax on insurers.

AN INDIVIDUAL MANDATE IS NOT A TAX INCREASE: On ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos insisted that penalizing Americans who don’t purchase health insurance coverage is a tax increase, a point Obama disputed. Indeed, prominent Republicans –  including Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee — have publicly criticized the bill’s individual requirement. Obama strongly defended the provision, insisting that “if you can’t afford health insurance, you certainly shouldn’t be punished for that.” Yet “what it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you any more than the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase. Obama also argued that when the uninsured receive uncompensated care, Americans with insurance compensate for their care in the form of higher premiums. “You and I are both paying $900 bucks on average — our families — in higher premiums because of uncompensated care.” The Center for American Progress has estimated that the failure to continuously cover all Americans accounts forroughly 8 percent of the average health insurance premium. This cost-shift amounts to $1,100 per average family premium in 2009, and $410 per average individual premium. By 2013, assuming the cost-shift remains the same percentage of premium costs, “the cost shift will be approximately $480 for an individual policy and $1,300 for a family policy.”

PREVENTING UNDOCUMENTED WORKERS FROM PURCHASINGCOVERAGE: Following the President’s address to a joint session of Congress, the White House endorsed “a provision that would require proof of citizenship before someone could enroll in a plan selected on the exchange.” The Senate Finance Committee bill requires new applicants to verify their immigration status. “Let me be clear,” Obama said on CNN, “I think that, if I’m not mistaken, almost all of the plans had specific language saying that illegal immigrants would not be covered. The question really was, was the enforcement mechanism strong enough? Here’s what I’ve said, and I will repeat: I don’t think that illegal immigrants should be covered under this health care plan. There should be a verification mechanism in place. We do that for a whole range of existing social programs. And I think that’s a pretty straightforward principle that will be met.” Still, some immigration advocates are concerned that the bill’s documentation requirements would weed out more eligible applicants than undocumented immigrants. According to a report from the Government Accountability Office, verification requirements have led thousands of Americans eligible for Medicaid to lose coverage and add new administrative costs that “far exceeded the savings.” A House oversight committee “reviewed six state Medicaid programs in 2007 and found that verification rules had cost the federal government an additional $8.3 million,” but they caught only eight undocumented immigrants.

ENERGY — GOP POLITICIANS PUSH FALSE CLAIM THAT CAP AND TRADE WOULD COST FAMILIES $1,761 PER YEAR: Last week, CBSNews.com libertarian blogger Declan McCullagh posted Treasury Department documents acquired by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), claiming that they revealed “a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent” — the equivalent of $1,761 a year per average American family. The Treasury Department called McCullagh’s conclusions “flat out wrong.” PolitiFact concluded that McCullagh’s claim was “false” and based on “incorrect assumptions and overly simple math.” As Center for American Progress Action Fund Senior Fellow Dan Weiss pointed out on Friday, the Congressional Budget Office released an updated analysis of the actual cap-and-trade legislation that passed the House, lowering its previous cost projection to “$160 per household,” which is equivalent to 44 cents per day. But this hasn’t stopped McCullagh’s false claim from spreading aroundthe conservative echo chamber. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) said on PBS’s NewsHour “that we now find out from the Treasury Department” that the House bill “would cost each American family over $1,700 per year.” At the Values Voter Summit on Saturday, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney also pushed the lie, saying that President Obama’s clean energy proposals “would cost the average American family $1,761 a year, the equivalent to a 15% income tax hike.” In all, at least eight conservative politicians have used the false $1,761 number as a talking point.