President addressed House Republicans in Baltimore on Friday and may have let something slip during his remarks on the health care bill. In this case, he casually mentioned provisions that were “snuck in” to the bill, which violated a “pledge” regarding a repeated promise he made that Americans could keep their insurance if they wanted to. (video below transcript):
“If you look at the package that we presented, and there are some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating…we were in the process of eliminating. For example, we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people, if you can have your—if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep You’re not going to have anybody get between you and your doctor in your decision-making, and I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated the pledge, and so we were in the process of scrubbing this and making sure that it was tight. But at its core, if you look at the basic proposal we put forward, that has an exchange, so that businesses and the self-employed can buy into a pool and can get bargaining power the same way big companies do. The insurance reforms that I’ve already discussed, making sure that there’s choice and competition for those who don’t have health insurance. The component parts to this thing are pretty similar to what Howard Baker, Bob Dole, and Tom Daschle proposed at the beginning of this debate last year. Now you may not agree with Bob Dole and Howard Baker, and certainly you don’t agree with Tom Daschle on much, but that’s not a radical bunch.”
