For those who are interested, I'll be talking about the White House response to the misleading Drudge health care video today around 3:10 PM EST on KUOW (NPR) Seattle's The Conversation with Ross Reynolds.
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August 04, 2009
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About Me
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Duke University in 2009 and served as a RWJ Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan from 2009-2011. I also tweet at @BrendanNyhan and serve as a media critic for Columbia Journalism Review. Previously, I co-edited Spinsanity, a non-partisan watchdog of political spin, and co-authored All the President's Spin. For more, see my bio or academic website.
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Perhaps I shouldn't comment until I read Brendan's presentation, but I'm struck by the weakness of the White House response.
It's fair to criticize Drudge and others for omitting Obama's reference to replacing employer coverage with some more portable system. But, what "more portable system" did Obama have in mind? He didn't specify that this "more portable" system be private.
I think it's very unlikely that the new, "more portable" health insurance would be private. Today private individual health insurance is a tiny percentage of the market. If employer health insurance is to be replaced by private individual health insurance (which would be portable) that would mean stupendous growth in individual health insurance at a time whan competition with a government plan made any growth difficult.
Put another way, employer-supplied health insurance constitutes almost all of private health insurance. So, eliminating employer health insurance means eliminating almost all of private health insurance.
Posted by: David | August 04, 2009 at 05:32 PM
P.S. Here's an uncut clip from 2003 where Obama expresses his unqualified support for a single-payer universal health care system. http://www.breitbart.tv/obama-in-03-id-like-to-see-a-single-payer-health-care-plan/
Posted by: David | August 04, 2009 at 05:37 PM