Obama's "Uninsured Americans" Lie

[Dr Adequate]

No, it's not irrelevant.

The question of what people other than Obama have said is indeed supremely irrelevant to whether Obama lied.

By the way, I love the way you surreptitiously edited Joe's post to conceal what he was talking about --- without apparently realizing that people reading this thread could read his post. It's such a marvelous combination of stupidity and dishonesty.

Whom did you hope to fool?

You cast your pearls of disinformation before an audience of intelligent skeptics with good research skills. Are you not wasting precious dishonesty that you could use to deceive stupid and ignorant people into actually agreeing with you?

It's no accident he said "Americans" rather than "US citizens".

Yeah, he's sneakily telling the truth. That's the sort of low-down trick only a liberal would stoop to. Why couldn't he have told a plain simple lie like conservatives do? But no, in his deceitful cunning he told the truth, and then when you speak out against him with a bit of good old-fashioned straight-talking dishonesty, for some reason people act as though you're the villain.

Is this what we've come to?

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

No, it's not irrelevant. They demonstrate the way that Obama's and other democrat's statements about uninsured "Americans" who "cannot afford" health insurance (and sometimes they even say health care) are perceived and interpreted by the general public. By using the language they do, democrats know that they are going to create the impression in the mind of the public that the uninsured problem is much bigger than it really is and therefore more urgent. They do that to help promote their political agenda. It's dishonest.

Obama surely must know the real figures. He's supposed to be a smart guy. Right? And he's also an expert in the meaning of language. That's what a Harvard Lawyer is trained to be ... and according to his supporters, he was one of the best and brightest. And Obama has demonstrated over and over that he's very careful about the way he phrases things in speeches and interviews. It's part of the reason he uses a lot of "uhs". It's no accident he said "Americans" rather than "US citizens". It's no accident that he fails to point out that over 17 million of the uninsured earn more than the median income in the US.

So you're retracting the whole Obama lied thing and now are saying that even though it's other people who are saying "citizens" that that is somehow proof that Obama's statement, which is not a lie, is dishonest?

You should be charged with torturing logic.

It was your side that led me to believe that Obama was going to be something special ... a change ... not the usual dishonest politician. Boy am I disappointed.

Now *that's* a lie. You didn't once think that Obama was not a politician, and you sure aren't disappointed--except that Obama won the election, a fact you can't seem to get over.

 

[Upchurch]

This is a joke right? If not, you must explain how 46 is not nearly 50.

Are you also downright obtuse?

Better you explain how 46 is 35.

How 46 is 18.

BAC, do you really not understand the word "nearly"?

nearly

1: in a close manner or relationship <nearly related>
2 a: almost but not quite <nearly identical> <nearly a year later> b: to the least extent <not nearly as good as we expected>

There is an 8% difference between 46 and 50. 46 is 92% of 50. These numbers are very close. 46 is almost but not quite 50. Thus, 46 is nearly 50.

50 is the nearest round number to 46. It is a natural rounding point.

How do you not understand this?

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

There is an 8% difference between 46 and 50. 46 is 92% of 50. These numbers are very close. 46 is almost but not quite 50. Thus, 46 is nearly 50.

50 is the nearest round number to 46. It is a natural rounding point.

And that's without even taking into account the fact that 46 million was from the 2005 Census, and all indications are that the proportion of uninsured Americans has increased fairly dramatically since then.

 

[applecorped]

Obama:

The reforms we seek would bring greater competition, choice, savings, and inefficiencies to our health care system and greater stability and security to America's families and businesses.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/20/AR2009072001538.html

 

[BeAChooser]

By the way, I love the way you surreptitiously edited Joe's post to conceal what he was talking about --- without apparently realizing that people reading this thread could read his post.

I did not "edit" Joe's post. I quoted a sentence directly from it and responded to the claim in that sentence. If anyone was trying to "edit", it was Joe, in implying that I claimed those citizen statements were made by Obama. I did no such thing and that's clear from the statement I made prior to listing them: "Now if you ask the average person in America what he thinks Obama is talking about when he uses the word "Americans", you'd find that he thinks Obama is referring to American citizens. In fact, you can find numerous instances on the internet where the 46 and 50 million Americans figures spouted by Obama and his crowd are described as "citizens"." Do you deny this, DA?

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

I did not "edit" Joe's post. I quoted a sentence directly from it and responded to the claim in that sentence. If anyone was trying to "edit", it was Joe, in implying that I claimed those citizen statements were made by Obama.

I made no such implication.

I merely pointed out that in support of your premise (that Obama lied when he said that there are "nearly 50 million" Americans without health insurance), all these quotes you provided are irrelevant since none of them are quotes of what Obama said.

Similarly, if I caught Rush Limbaugh telling a lie, it would not serve as evidence, for example, for the assertion that John McCain told a lie. (That is, quoting Rush would be irrelevant to the claim that McCain told a lie.)

"Now if you ask the average person in America what he thinks Obama is talking about when he uses the word "Americans", you'd find that he thinks Obama is referring to American citizens. In fact, you can find numerous instances on the internet where the 46 and 50 million Americans figures spouted by Obama and his crowd are described as "citizens"." Do you deny this, DA?

Whether the "average person" can correctly characterize what Obama said is also irrelevant to your claim that what Obama said is a lie.


ETA: And frankly, I think the overall point is that the current system is problematic because a great many people have little to no access to health care. The last I checked, the U.S. ranked something like 37th in health care, and part of the criteria for that assessment was outcome measures (like infant mortality, longevity, etc.) and access to services. That is, I think what the "average person" understands Obama to be saying is that too many people lack insurance (or more accurately access to health care).

 

[joobz]

I did not "edit" Joe's post. I quoted a sentence directly from it and responded to the claim in that sentence. If anyone was trying to "edit", it was Joe, in implying that I claimed those citizen statements were made by Obama. I did no such thing and that's clear from the statement I made prior to listing them: "Now if you ask the average person in America what he thinks Obama is talking about when he uses the word "Americans", you'd find that he thinks Obama is referring to American citizens. In fact, you can find numerous instances on the internet where the 46 and 50 million Americans figures spouted by Obama and his crowd are described as "citizens"." Do you deny this, DA?

So Obama was lying becuase other people made errors?

 

[BeAChooser]

You should be charged with torturing logic.

You should be charged with failing to grasp it. Why indeed you were, when I called you "obtuse".

Quote:
It was your side that led me to believe that Obama was going to be something special ... a change ... not the usual dishonest politician. Boy am I disappointed.

Now *that's* a lie. You didn't once think that Obama was not a politician, and you sure aren't disappointed--except that Obama won the election, a fact you can't seem to get over.

You are wrong. I would love nothing better to than to see a democrat politician actually try to keep his campaign promises (not necessarily succeed in them when I don't agree with some of those promises, but at least "try" to keep them) and not lie to the public unless national security demanded it. And we were most certainly led to believe Obama was going to be something special by your side of the aisle when it comes to truthfulness. The majority on side of the political aisle kept ranting about "Bush Lied" during the campaign, so naturally the folks on my side thought you didn't like the lying and were expecting something different (i.e., no lying) from Obama.

And by the way, I like the way you (to borrow DA's way of putting it) "surreptitiously edited" my statement to "conceal" my meaning. You dropped my use of the word "dishonest" as if all I said is that I was led to believe Obama would not be a politician.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

By the way, the intro to your long list of citations of blogs and anonymous postings that use the term "citizens" was:

In fact, you can find numerous instances on the internet where the 46 and 50 million Americans figures spouted by Obama and his crowd are described as "citizens". Here:

You seem to be conflating what people say about what Obama said and what Obama ("and his crowd") actually said.

The way I read this I actually thought you were going to provide a list of quotations of "Obama and his crowd", but instead it was what a bunch of other people said.

Come on--the one was a review of Michael Moore's Sicko, a documentary that came out well before Obama was even running for president much less before he said anything about his proposed health care reform plan. Surely you can't claim that that guy was somehow precognitively referring to "figures spouted by Obama"? Or are you perhaps saying that Michael Moore is interchangeable with Obama?

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

The majority on side of the political aisle kept ranting about "Bush Lied" during the campaign, so naturally the folks on my side thought you didn't like the lying and were expecting something different (i.e., no lying) from Obama.

Now you're derailing your own thread. You're trying hard to make the case that Obama lied (because 150,000 jobs created or saved is either too small or too large, because he predicted a wrong maximum unemployment figure for the current economic crisis, because 46 million isn't "nearly 50 million"), because you're trying to make Obama's rhetoric similar to that of a guy who claimed that we don't torture when he knew we did, that there was a strong case that Iraq had a huge cache of illegal WMDs when there wasn't, that we actually discovered said WMDs when we hadn't.

Sorry, it's not even close to being the same sort of credibility issue.

You dropped my use of the word "dishonest" as if all I said is that I was led to believe Obama would not be a politician.

I quoted your statement as it was written. My point was that you never were pulling for Obama to be successful in anything, and you can't possibly be disappointed with what you perceive to be his failures. Especially since you have to torture enhanced-ly interrogate logic to spin any of these things into failures or lies.

You're grasping at straws.

 

[BeAChooser]

all indications are that the proportion of uninsured Americans has increased fairly dramatically since then.

And all indications are that the number of uninsured people who are illegal aliens has ALSO dramatically increased since 2005. Do you know that it's estimated that less than 1 in 4 illegals crossing our borders is caught? Do the math. In 2005, over a million were caught. In 2006, over a million were caught. About three quarters of a million were caught in both 2007 and 2008.

 

[tyr_13]

And all indications are that the number of uninsured people who are illegal aliens has ALSO dramatically increased since 2005. Do you know that it's estimated that less than 1 in 4 illegals crossing our borders is caught? Do the math. In 2005, over a million were caught. In 2006, over a million were caught. About three quarters of a million were caught in both 2007 and 2008.

Wait, so because the number of illegals has also increased the number uninsured citizens, which has also increased, means what? So what if the number of illegals uninsured increased, so did the number of legal citizens.

 

[thaiboxerken]

50 million uninsured is unacceptable. 40 million, however, is just fine.

 

[joobz]

Wait, so because the number of illegals has also increased the number uninsured citizens, which has also increased, means what? So what if the number of illegals uninsured increased, so did the number of legal citizens.

Of course. But BAC doesn't want you to see it that way. And the fact is (as has been stated already), illegal immigrants who aren't covered are going to raise our health care insurance even more.

Ceratianly, one could argue that illegal immigration should be stopped. (We'll need to thank Bush for this). But that doesn't stop the cost on health care now.

Remember the formula.
1.) Uninsured people avoid doctors until it's life threatening.
2.) Life saving treatment can not be turned away by hospitals.
3.) these costs raise overall health care costs which raises health insurance.
4.) preventative health care reduces costs by limiting the need for extremely costly life saving measures.

 

[BeAChooser]

all these quotes you provided are irrelevant since none of them are quotes of what Obama said.

And I'll repeat that they are relevant because they show what an astute politician (and you'd agree that Obama is astute, right?) would expect listeners to think when one uses the word "Americans" in the context it was used. The point is that if Obama is as smart as everyone on your side of the political aisle claims, he surely knew when he used the word "Americans", that the public at large would misinterpret the word and think he was talking about "US citizens". If true, that makes the act of using the word, dishonest. Right?

The last I checked, the U.S. ranked something like 37th in health care

Only in a WHO study which was biased in it's very formulation against a US type health care system.

http://www.voiceofthetimes.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1014&Itemid=2

Healthcare interventionists frequently cite the World Health Organization's World Health Report 2000, which studied the performance of 191 countries' healthcare systems — and awarded the U.S. a dismal rank of number 37.



While the WHO rankings are touted as an objective measure of the relative performance of healthcare systems, in reality they depend on a number of ideological or logically incoherent assumptions.


... snip ...

Some people are happy to give up a few potential months or even years of life in exchange for the pleasures of smoking, eating, having sex, playing sports, and so on. The WHO approach, rather than taking people's preferences as given, deems some preferences better than others, and then praises or blames the health system for them.


Those who cite the WHO ranking to justify greater government involvement in the health system — like the plans pitched by the leading Democratic presidential candidates — are assuming what they're trying to prove. 

The WHO healthcare ranking system does not escape political bias. It advances ideological assumptions that most Americans might find questionable under the guise of objectivity.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0807/stossel082207.php3?printer_friendly

Why the U.S. ranks low on WHO's health-care study

By John Stossel

...snip ...

So what's wrong with the WHO and Commonwealth Fund studies? Let me count the ways.

The WHO judged a country's quality of health on life expectancy. But that's a lousy measure of a health-care system. Many things that cause premature death have nothing do with medical care. We have far more fatal transportation accidents than other countries. That's not a health-care problem.

Similarly, our homicide rate is 10 times higher than in the U.K., eight times higher than in France, and five times greater than in Canada.

When you adjust for these "fatal injury" rates, U.S. life expectancy is actually higher than in nearly every other industrialized nation.

Diet and lack of exercise also bring down average life expectancy.

Another reason the U.S. didn't score high in the WHO rankings is that we are less socialistic than other nations. What has that got to do with the quality of health care? For the authors of the study, it's crucial. The WHO judged countries not on the absolute quality of health care, but on how "fairly" health care of any quality is "distributed." The problem here is obvious. By that criterion, a country with high-quality care overall but "unequal distribution" would rank below a country with lower quality care but equal distribution.

http://smartgirlnation.com/2009/06/...irly-misrepresents-the-us-health-care-system/

In summary, therefore, the WHO ranking system has minimal objectivity in its “ranking” of world health. It more accurately can be described as a ranking system inherently biased to reward the uniformity of “government” delivered (i.e. “socialized”) health care, independent of the care actually delivered.

and part of the criteria for that assessment was outcome measures (like infant mortality, longevity, etc.)

The many deficiencies in using those two measures to quantify the quality of health care systems in countries has already been pointed out several times on this forum (for example, see the many posts on that in thread: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=146439&page=4 ). Your side of the debate has simply ignored these criticism. You are just regurgitating what is already proven nonsense, Joe.

and access to services.

This too has been discredited on those threads. Your side simply ignores the impact of long wait times, and the unavailability of certain medicines, tests and even doctors on "access" ... because UHC systems don't measure well against the US system in those areas.

That is, I think what the "average person" understands Obama to be saying is that too many people lack insurance (or more accurately access to health care).

If that's true, Joe, then the average person should be told by Obama that in country after country that have Universal Health Care systems, illegals don't even have access to health CARE. The US at least provides those people with help when they go to our ERs or hospitals. And that's one reason those other systems are less expensive than ours. Is Obama suggesting we take away that *option* from our illegal population?

 

[joobz]

I see that you want to demonstrate you are obtuse too. You don't seem to understand how I derived the 18 million (depends on the number of illegals AND those who didn't buy insurance but could have afforded it) or 35 million figure (depends only on the number of illegals), even though I spelled it out in very simple terms and language multiple times on this thread.

Should I believe THE US census numbers or BAC's NUmbers....

What to do, what to do

No, all you've demonstrated is that you haven't read the thread. That's called being "clueless".

Interesting how you ignored the 2 to 1 observation in the Census numbers. (You know, the numbers that are reliable).

 

[Safe-Keeper]

I see that you want to demonstrate you are obtuse too. You don't seem to understand how I derived the 18 million (depends on the number of illegals AND those who didn't buy insurance but could have afforded it) or 35 million figure (depends only on the number of illegals), even though I spelled it out in very simple terms and language multiple times on this thread.

I like how you try to reduce the number of uninsured Americans by telling us how certain residents don't count, for some arbitrary definition. Not that it matters, since no matter how you got to the US, once you are there it hurts you and society exactly as much whether you've lived there for 10 or 50 years when you develop a serious illness and don't have a good insurance.

Do you use this reasoning when arriving at other statistics, too? What about voters or gun owners? What about health statistics? How about educational achievements? Do you try to remove people who are not "true Americans" from those statistics, too?

"x million people support {stance supported by BAC}? No, no, you need to substract the number of Americans who are not TRUE Americans! Here, let me revise your figure..."

 

[Tricky]

A significant percentage of this thread has been sent to AAH, mostly for bickering. When mass moves like this occur, it is inevitable that some posts that might have normally been okay in a "non-bickering" thread get axed. I apologize for that. Even if you have replied calmly to a bickering post, by quoting and responding to it, you are continuing the bickering process, and that is usually why I moved it. Also, I go through these things with an axe, not a scalpel, so don't expect scarless-surgery.

Instead, focus on the questions and not on insulting each other or responding to insults.

Thank you.

Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Tricky

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

And I'll repeat that they are relevant because they show what an astute politician (and you'd agree that Obama is astute, right?) would expect listeners to think when one uses the word "Americans" in the context it was used. The point is that if Obama is as smart as everyone on your side of the political aisle claims, he surely knew when he used the word "Americans", that the public at large would misinterpret the word and think he was talking about "US citizens". If true, that makes the act of using the word, dishonest. Right?

Again, quoting a bunch of bloggers and anonymous posters is irrelevant to the charge you are making that Obama lied.

If you're trying to make some other point--"that Obama is astute" or whatever--then it's off topic.

If that's true, Joe, then the average person should be told by Obama that in country after country that have Universal Health Care systems, illegals don't even have access to health CARE.

First, I'm not sure your collection of bloggers and anonymous posters is a fair representation of the "average person". Second, you're assuming they all got their information from Obama, even though it's clear many (perhaps most of them) did not. The guy reviewing Michael Moore's Sicko most certainly did not get his information from Obama, since that film and presumably the review was written before Obama was even a candidate.

I should remind you that your claim is that Obama is lying in promoting his health care reform plan.

And finally, even if it all these bloggers and anonymous posters you cite are all misquoting Obama, you've moved the goalposts considerably. You've shifted from the claim that Obama lied to a claim that because you think the "average person" got it wrong that it's up to Obama to correct them. So even though Obama's statement was NOT a lie, you think he's lying as long as he doesn't correct every blogger and anonymous poster on the interwebs? That's a very strange standard for "lying".

Or are you ready to concede that Obama wasn't lying when he said "nearly 50 million Americans" lack health insurance?

I refer you again to factcheck.org's article on this topic. It basically says depending on how you count "uninsured" you can get a number higher or lower than the 46 million (uninsured at any given point in time during the year). Something like 28 million were uninsured for the entire year, and something like 65.9 million were uninsured for at least one month. Again, these figures come from the 2005 Census, and we can expect all these figures to be higher since the economy took a turn for the worse since then. Even if you remove illegal aliens (estimated to be about 6 million in this article), using the term "nearly 50 million" is still reasonable.

ETA: For the record, I'm no fan of Obama's health care reform plan. I think it merely reinforces the insurance system with all it's profit centers that have nothing to do with health care. I'd prefer a single payer system, but it looks like that's not going to happen even though this is perhaps the best chance we'll have in a long time to try for it. I hope what Obama proposes works. On the topic of this thread, I'm merely pointing out that BaC's claim that Obama lied is unfounded.