The BidenCare Whopper
President Barack Obama’s claim about keeping your doctor under ObamaCare was the 2013 PolitiFact “Lie of the Year.” Now ex-veep Joe Biden’s echoed claim about his own health-care reform bids to be the “Lie of the Decade.”
“If you like your health-care plan, your employer-based plan, you can keep it,” Biden insisted Monday as he laid out his proposal to “build” on ObamaCare. That’s exactly what Obama vowed, even as his plan plainly ensured that millions would lose their coverage.
Biden’s plan is also sure to kill existing coverage: By extending federal subsidies to everyone, no matter how much they make, it guarantees that some employers will terminate their policies and off-load costs onto the government.
Other companies may send workers to Biden’s “public option” (i.e., government-run health insurance), which would offer major cost-saving advantages over private policies.
He wants to look more moderate than his 2020 rivals, so Biden paints their calls for Medicare for All as radical — pointing out
that it means Medicare as we know it today “goes away.” As does ObamaCare. And “dropping 300 million people on a totally new plan, I think, is a little risky.”
Americans — more than 200 million of whom have private insurance — overwhelmingly oppose losing their plans. Yet Biden’s approach just takes longer to get to the same result.
Keep adding subsidies to government health plans, while adding new taxes and other burdens on private ones, and eventually you’ll kill the entire private market.
All the Democrats’ health-care ideas, by the way, involve the tacit admission that ObamaCare failed to make health care widely “affordable” as promised, despite its budget-busting cost.
Obama claimed his program would boost spending by “merely” $940 billion over 10 years. Now the Congressional Budget Office pegs it at $1.6 trillion for the next decade. Biden says his plan would add another $750 billion; his rivals’ proposals run even more.
In short, they all want to double- or tripledown on a pricey failure.