Obama Misquotes Health Care Leaders

As you may have heard, the president had a meeting Monday with leaders from 6 major health care organizations. After the meeting, the president made the following statement.

These groups are voluntarily coming together to make an unprecedented commitment,” Mr. Obama said. “Over the next 10 years, from 2010 to 2019, they are pledging to cut the rate of growth of national health care spending by 1.5 percentage points each year — an amount that’s equal to over $2 trillion.”

Well, according to the health care folks, that was NOT what they said. They did agree to work to cut the rate of increase in costs, with the target being that eventually the annual rate of increase would be about 1.5%. That's a lot different than what the president said.

To add to the confusion, the director of the White House Office of Health Reform, said “the president misspoke” on at least 2 different occasions. But yesterday, she took that back and said that the president did not misspeak (wonder what the health care execs think of that!)

This is another case of the president saying something that is not correct, but sounds good. As you read the full article, notice the statement about hospitals putting major construction projects on hold, given all the confusion about what is going to happen in the health care arena.