FACT CHECK: Obama's Tone Shifts on Bending the Health Care Cost Curve

[Elmore Furth]

Health costs in the US account for 17 percent of the GDP and is expected to increase to almost 20 percent by 2019.

President Obama early on predicted that reforming the healthcare system would bend the cost curve down but now he is admitting that may have been overly optimistic.

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 11, 2010
Filed at 3:20 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama told voters repeatedly during the health care debate that the overhaul legislation would bring down fast-rising health care costs and save them money. Now, he's hemming and hawing on that.

So far, the law he signed earlier this year hasn't had the desired effect. An analysis from Medicare's Office of the Actuary this week said that the nation's health care tab will go up -- not down -- through 2019 as a result of Obama's sweeping law, though the increase is modest.

Last August he predicted: ''The American people are going to be glad that we acted to change an unsustainable system so that more people have coverage, we're bending the cost curve, and we're getting insurance reforms.''

On Friday, he conceded: "Bending the cost curve on health care is hard to do." The goal: "Slowly bring down those costs."

FACT CHECK: Obama's Tone Shifts on Health Care

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[secondwind]

2. we need the PO!~

[RC]

3. More ammunition for Single Payer, Universal Health Care.

Get the greedy, corrupt, parasitic middlemen out from between our doctors and our health care. They contribute nothing to our continued well being.

[burnsei sensei]

4. Corporate management is not civilized,

nor is it a pro-social or national force.
Corporations must be controlled by law.
The people and their interests must be supreme.

[BattyDem]

5. So, it's hard to do ... and yet every other country does it.

This is what happens when you base reform around maintaining the profits of the people causing the problem. Reform should have been based on providing access and care to the people who need a solution. If you insist on keeping profit-hungry, middlemen in between people and health care, costs will never go down.