HEALTH POLITICS: Facts are Stubborn Things

With health reform heating up, the White House is stepping up its efforts to dispel false claims and respond to the tidal wave of misinformation coming from foes of reform. 

On Tuesday the White House posted a video (below) from Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House's Health Reform Office, responding to the claims of a particular video that had been making the rounds on conservative media.

Douglass explains:

 You know the people who always try to scare people whenever you try to bring them health-insurance reform are at it again. And they're taking sentences and phrases out of context, and they're cobbling them together to leave a very false impression. The truth is that the president has been talking to the American people a lot about health-insurance reform and what is at stake for them.

She then lets the president's own words clarify his position on health reform, using two clips from recent events. In the first, Obama tells listeners at a recent AARP tele-town hall that if they like their insurance plan, or doctor, or both they will be able to keep them. In the second clip from the president's recent primetime press conference, Obama reiterates that point in the context of public health insurance option, which he described as "as important tool to discipline insurers."

Meanwhile, Media Matters goes straight to the source of the misinformation -- putting the misquoted statements (bolded) from Obama in the full context of his speech at a 2007 forum:

I would hope that we could set up a system that allows those who can go through their employer to access a federal system or a state pool of some sort. But I don't think we're going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There's going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out where we've got a much more portable system. Employers still have the option of providing coverage, but many people may find that they get better coverage, or at least coverage that gives them more for health care dollars than they spend outside of their employer. And I think we've got to facilitate that and let individuals make that choice to transition out of employer coverage.

We hope that viewers note that he's not talking about taking choice away from people. He's talking about giving them more of it.