http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/09/11/the-gop-attack-on-a-dubious-obama-health-care-pledge/?hpid=z5
“President Obama promised that his health care plan would reduce annual insurance premiums by $2,500 a family by the end of his first term. That has not happened. According to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, the average family premium for people getting insurance at work is nearly $3,000 higher than it was when the President took office.”
–Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wy.), GOP weekly address, Sept. 7, 2013
What happens if a politician makes a pledge and is called out by fact checkers for being silly and misleading? And what if the pledge also concerns a plan that turns out to be different than what he proposed during the campaign? Is the pledge still valid for ridicule by the other side?
That’s the interesting question raised by Sen. Barrasso’s carefully-worded remarks during the GOP’s weekly radio address. Let’s take a look.
The Facts
Obama referred to this $2,500 promise at least 19 times during the 2008 campaign, according to an interesting video supplied by Barrasso’s office:The specifics were later out in a campaign memo, which called the $2,500 figure a “best-guess” assumption.But Obama’s pledge came with a very large asterisk: He was not saying premiums would fall by $2,500, but that health-care costs per person would be that much lower than anticipated.In other words, if overall costs–not just premiums–were expected to rise by $5,000 by 2012, they would only rise by $2,500. Yep, that’s what Obama’s pledge meant, even if he was not especially clear about it and frequently misstated it.
regardless to right wing "i know you are but what am i" games they play Pres. would not allow something like that to be put out over and over if it were a lie, that's a right wing thing like jeep going to China, grandma under the bus, deah squads, it's an abomination and every other misinformation you've heard.
When Obama made this claim in 2008, he was quickly called out by fact checkers. The Fact Checker awarded Obama Pinocchios for the pledge, saying it was based on shaky assumptions (such as a Rand Corp. study that was criticized by the Congressional Budget Office) and that there was no guarantee that any cost savings would be passed on to consumers.Moreover, once Obama became president, the health care proposal he advocated as a candidate was significantly changed, even to the point of accepting the individual mandate that he had so criticized when Hillary Rodham Clinton promoted it. To some extent, Obama could argue that such changes should get him off the hook from his pledge, but the White House continues to claim that costs will not rise as quickly as previously estimated. But rather than $2,500 by the end of Obama’s first term, the White House says it would be $2,000 in savings by 2019—in part because the health care law will not even be fully implemented until 2014.
to me that makes all predictions just guesstimates by those who want to get rid of it in the first place, 40 times voting to defund a law haven't heard anything that addresses that. all this lollygagging and waste of taxpayer money is null and void, it has not implemented yet, you are being mislead by those who want you mislead so you won't engage doesn't that and all the obstruction tell you that this mist be a really good plan when those who have had no interest in "we the people" for 4 1/2 years have fought so diligently kicking everything to the curb but destroy the best ins. you will get short of free home visits that bring MRI and CAT scan machines to your house, yeah that good.
