Video: Obama’s Lied – 8 Times – About Televised Healthcare Negotiations

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obama4[Video below.] Democrat leaders are meeting behind closed doors to bring the Senate and House health care bills together. On at least eight occasions, President Barack Obama promised to televise national healthcare plans on C-SPAN to allow the American people see what is being offered, what is being proposed, who is giving, and who is taking.

What happened to Obama’s promise of open government? Why hasn’t the Obama administration televised healthcare negotiations on C-SPAN?

Click below to see eight clips of Obama promising televised healthcare negotiations:

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The following is an AP report on the matter:

– The White House was put on the defensive Wednesday after President Barack Obama pushed congressional leaders to fast-track health care legislation behind closed doors despite his campaign promises of an open process.

“The president wants to get a bill to his desk as quickly as possible,” Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said as reporters questioned him repeatedly about Obama’s decision to go along with House and Senate leaders in bypassing the usual negotiations between the two chambers in the interest of speed.

The decision was made in an Oval Office meeting Tuesday evening with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his No. 2, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., joined in by phone.

They agreed that rather than setting up a formal conference committee to resolve differences between health bills passed last year by the House and Senate, the House will work off the Senate’s version, amend it and send it back to the Senate for final passage, according to a House leadership aide, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the private meeting.

Obama himself will take a hands-on role, and is convening another meeting with congressional leaders at the White House on Wednesday. Pelosi and four Democratic committee leaders are expected to attend.

Gibbs told reporters Wednesday to “ask the leaders in Congress” about the fast-track approach, even though Obama was involved in making it and the closed nature of the proceedings is at odds with a promise he made while campaigning for president. In a January 2008 debate, Obama said that his approach to health care talks would involve “bringing all parties together, and broadcasting those negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are.”

Republicans have jumped on the contradiction to accuse Obama and Democrats of operating in secret, an assertion Democrats dispute. “There has never been a more open process for any legislation in anyone who serves here’s experience,” Pelosi declared at a news conference Tuesday.

Asked about Obama’s campaign trail promise, Pelosi remarked, without elaboration, “There are a number of things he was for on the campaign trail.”

Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly said Wednesday it was not a slap at the president. “It was a quip,” Daly said.

The fast-track process isn’t unheard of in Congress but it is unusual. Democrats passed their health care bills by razor-thin margins and with barely any Republican support last year. The quick approach to reconcile the bills will exclude GOP lawmakers and reduce the party’s ability to delay or force politically troubling votes in both houses.

Ahead of Wednesday’s White House meeting Pelosi summoned her top lieutenants and committee chairmen to search for concessions and trade-offs they can reach with the Senate in order to deliver a bill to Obama in time for the State of the Union speech sometime early next month.

House Democrats are reluctant to abandon elements of their legislation favored by liberals but rejected by Senate moderates, but face doing just that. Reid has no votes to spare in his 60-member caucus so the legislation must be largely tailored along the lines favored by the Senate.

That means no new government insurance plan, which the House wanted but the Senate omitted, and changes to the House’s preferred payment scheme. The House wants to raise income taxes on individuals making more than $500,000 and couples over $1 million. The Senate would slap a new tax on high-cost insurance plans. Although the Obama administration supports the Senate’s insurance tax as a cost-saver, labor unions, which contribute heavily to Democratic candidates, oppose it.

House Rules Committee Chairman Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., said that leaders spent Wednesday morning comparing the House and Senate bills, and “concluded as we always do that our bill is so much better.”

Nonetheless Slaughter, like others, sounded ready to deal. On the different taxation approaches, “There’s a lot of talk about whether there’d be sort of a hybrid between ours and the Senate,” she said.

The House may end up accepting the insurance tax if it hits fewer people than the Senate’s design now calls for. There also could be common ground on a Senate proposal to raise Medicare payroll taxes.

In place of a new government insurance plan House Democrats plan to insist on stronger affordability measures for the middle and lower classes, and they also favor revoking insurers’ antitrust exemption. Obama agreed at Tuesday evening’s meeting to help strengthen affordability measures beyond what’s in the Senate bill, the aide said.

The bills passed by the House and Senate both would require nearly all Americans to get coverage and would provide subsidies for many who can’t afford the cost, but they differ on hundreds of details. Among them are whom to tax, how many people to cover, how to restrict taxpayer funding for abortion and whether illegal immigrants should be allowed to buy coverage in the new markets with their own money.

Concerns about affordability are paramount. Major subsidies under the bills wouldn’t start flowing to consumers until 2013 at the earliest. Even with federal aid, many families still would face substantial costs.

The House bill would provide $602 billion in subsidies from 2013-2019, covering an additional 36 million people. The Senate bill would start the aid a year later, providing $436 billion in subsidies from 2014-2019, and reducing the number of uninsured by 31 million.

But sweetening the deal for low- and middle-income households could require more taxes to pay for additional subsidies.

{Noam Amdurski-Matzav.com Newscenter}


11 COMMENTS

  1. This is the worst kind of yellow journalism that I’ve seen in some time. I don’t like President Obama (and I didn’t vote for him), but this does not excuse out-and-out dirty propoganda.

    The letter that Brian Lamb (C-SPAN’S acting CEO) wrote, requesting televised access to the Health Care Bill negotiations, is conspicuously addressed to the Majority and Minority leaders of the House and Senate. (The letter can be read on C-SPANS’s website). The president is not addressed. WHY?

    Because as every schoolchild knows, the Constitution provides for “separation of powers.” The president has NO AUTHORITY over the Congress and its decision making process. Obama has NO AUTHORITY to authorize C-SPAN’s televising of Congressional debates.

    In all of the clips in this video, Obama assumed that Congress would agree to a transparent and publicly televised process. If his own party’s Congressional leaders say no to television cameras, he has NO AUTHORITY to override them.

  2. I agree with yoselle, especially since Rav Elyashiv is quoted as saying we should not criticize Mr.Obama.
    How many times did the Bush administration lie to us

  3. I don’t know what respect has to do with lying. One can respect authority while questioning why they lied. We don’t have a dictatorship (or I thought we don’t), and if an authority figure says repeatedly that he will do something, and then blatantly does not, intelligent people have a responsibility to question and hold him accountable.

    If Obama has “no authority” in regard to C-Span televising, as one poster commented, then he should not have made those promises. As I’m sure Obama knows the law as well as the poster above, then his repeated assertions that “it will be on C-Span, open to the public, involving the American people” etc etc were outright lies. That is inexcusable.

  4. promising something in a campaign and not being able to fullfill it in time does not make one a liar.
    if thats the case then every president since washington has been a big fat liar.

  5. didn’t we learn that once a liar always a liar..and isn’t the punishment of a liar is that noone will beleieve them when they actually tell the truth..

  6. to #4:

    First of all, C-SPAN *HAS* been covering the Congressional debates all along. Don’t believe it? Type “CSPAN Coverage of Senate Debate on Health Care” in the YouTube search bar. There are 39 videos of (very boring) debates. Obama didn’t lie…C-SPAN’s cameras have been there for anyone to follow along. That’s the FACT, and not the propaganda.

    If Congressional democratic leaders won’t allow this final stage of negotiations to be televised, it is, as pointed out, beyond Obama’s control. Even if he may agree with it, he ultimately has no authority to make the final decision.

  7. Eight times is what is remembered and there are most likely many more. Besides any promise made during the campaign I personally take with a grain of salt. People tell us what we wish to hear and what will get them elected. Personally I look at past achievements.

  8. Really scary how OBAMA has chrismatic,hypnotic hold on both the congress and Senate. The supernatural way he is getting things done is just not normal.
    It sort of reminds me of…(skip it for now).

  9. #1 Yossele

    “I think as orthodox we should be more
    respectful of our leaders.”

    Ah yingele, gay shlufen it will be okay & vash nagel vasser. This is not for you. Let the grownups handle this.

    It’s called freedom of speech. This
    is still a republic. Use your freedom. This
    is not a monarchy. Educated citizens are supposed to criticize their elected officials.
    Elected officials are supposed to serve the people.

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