From Red State:

Did President Obama Lie About Health Care in His non-SOTU Tuesday Night, or Are He and His Staff Just That Ignorant?

In his non-State of the Union speech Tuesday night, President Obama claimed that health care “is a cost that now causes a bankruptcy in America every 30 seconds,” and that, “in the last eight years, premiums have grown four times faster than wages.”

Further, he claimed that “one million more Americans…lost their health insurance” in “each” of the eight years of the Bush administration.

Each of these statements is so demonstrably false that the only two conclusions one can reach about their inclusion in Tuesday’s speech are (1) President Obama was willingly lying, and was counting on the American people to be too stupid to fact-check him or too apathetic to do anything about his untruths, or (2) President Obama and his researchers and speechwriters are either too ignorant or too intellectually lazy (or both) to get their factstalking points remotely straight.

My money’s on a combination of the two. I don’t think the researchers and writers care all that much about accuracy (it’s not like a Democratic president is going to get hit with a make-believe controversy over, say, sixteen words that are actually true); likewise, I don’t think President Obama particularly cares whether he’s telling the truth or lying to the great unwashed in this country, just so long as his talking points are getting out and his agenda enacted.

Courtesy of some research help from Greg Scandlen, director of Consumers for Health Care Choices at The Heartland Institute, here’s the real info on the health care stats Mr. Obama just couldn’t help but fudge:

Health care “is a cost that now causes a bankruptcy in America every 30 seconds.”
There are 525,600 minutes in a year, so that rate of medically-induced bankruptcy would be 1,051,200 per year. But the total number of bankruptcies in 2007 was just 822,590, and only a fraction of those, possibly as low as 5% according to a University of California study, were due to medical costs. Interestingly, the population with the greatest growth in bankruptcy rates are those covered by Medicare. Since 1991, bankruptcies have actually decreased for people below age 65, but increased 125% for those between 65 and 75 and increased 433% for those over age 75.

“By the end of the year, it could cause 1.5 million Americans to lose their homes.”
This one is a mystery. Sure, plenty of people are “losing their homes,” about 3 million this year, but to think that half of those are due to medical bills rather than ARMs or lay-offs seems like a reach.

“In the last eight years, premiums have grown four times faster than wages.”
Actually, premiums have stabilized for the past five years at about 6% annual increase, while wages have been increasing about 4%, according to Mercer. Mr. Obama may have been thinking about the spike in 2002 when premiums rose 14% and wages rose about 3%, but that was a one-year exception and not representative. It’s worth remembering, also, that some companies - notably those that have adopted consumer directed plans - are seeing premium increases well below either inflation or the increase in wages. Watson Wyatt found that the “best performing” companies had a two-year cost increase of just one percent while other companies increased 10% over the same time.

“And in each of these years, one million more Americans have lost their health insurance.”
That’s not true, either. According to the most recent report by EBRI in September, 2008, the raw numbers of uninsured rose from 39.5 million in 2001 to 45 million in 2007. Raw numbers aren’t the right way to count in any case due to population growth. The percentage of uninsured between 2001 and 2007 went from 14.8% to 15.3% according to the Census Bureau, which is lower than the percentage in 1995 (15.4%), 1996 (15.6%), 1997 (16.1%), or 1998 (16.3%).

http://www.redstate.com/jeff_emanuel/2009/02/26/did-president-obama-lie-...