This story is a repost from HuffingtonPost.com.
Pushing back against his critics, President Barack Obama says overhauling the health care system, while helping millions of people, also will test whether policy makers can “serve the national interest despite the unrelenting efforts of the special interests.”
The administration is trying to build momentum for the president’s overhaul effort after the Senate Finance Committee voted 14-9 vote this week for a bill that would extend health care coverage to millions of people. One Republican, Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, supported the bill, and the measure faces considerable opposition from the health care industry, labor unions and large business organizations.
“The history is clear: For decades rising health care costs have unleashed havoc on families, businesses and the economy,” the president said Saturday in his weekly radio and Internet address. “And for decades, whenever we have tried to reform the system, the insurance companies have done everything in their considerable power to stop us.”
“It’s smoke and mirrors,” the president added. “It’s bogus. And it’s all too familiar. Every time we get close to passing reform, the insurance companies produce these phony studies as a prescription and say, ‘Take one of these, and call us in a decade.’ Well, not this time.”
The health insurance industry released a study earlier this week concluding that the Finance Committee bill – one of five competing House and Senate health care measures – would raise premiums significantly for millions of people who already have health coverage.
The report drew intense criticism from the White House, congressional Democrats and other advocates of the bill who deemed the study a last-ditch effort to sway public opinion against the White House-backed measure.
Obama said he would not abide “those who would bend the truth or break it to score political points and stop our progress as a country.” He accused the industry of “filling the airwaves with deceptive and dishonest ads,” sending money and lobbyists to Capitol Hill and paying for studies “designed to mislead the American people.”
The bills moving through Congress generally would require most Americans to buy insurance, provide federal subsidies to help lower-income people afford coverage and help small businesses defray the cost of extending coverage to their workers.
