After Barack Obama’s health care speech aired a few nights ago Hannity made an egregious error in his wording. During Barack’s speech the president makes a point in saying that insurance lenders aren’t bad people, that what they do is just good business. However Hannity "misinterprets" this information and clearly quotes the president in saying that insurance lenders are bad people. I just want to know if Hannity admitted to his flaw or still thinks his s**t dont stink.

President Obama is proposing to begin a vast expansion of the U.S. health-care system by creating a $634 billion reserve fund over the next decade, launching an overhaul that most experts project will ultimately cost at least $1 trillion.

The “reserve fund” in the budget proposal being released today is Obama’s attempt to demonstrate how the country could extend health insurance to millions more Americans and at the same time begin to control escalating medical bills that threaten the solvency of families, businesses and the government.

Obama aims to make a “very substantial down payment” toward universal coverage by trimming tax breaks for the wealthy and squeezing payments to insurers, hospitals, doctors and drug manufacturers, a senior administration official said yesterday.

Embedded in the budget figures are key policy changes that the administration argues would improve the quality of care and bring much-needed efficiency to a health system that costs $2.3 trillion a year.

By first identifying a large pot of money to underwrite health-care reform — before laying out a proposal on who would be covered or how — Obama hopes to draw Congress to the bargaining table to tackle the details of a comprehensive plan. The strategy is largely intended to avoid the mistakes of the Clinton administration, which crafted an extensive proposal in secret for many months before delivering the finished product to lawmakers, who quickly rejected it.

“We aim to get to universal coverage,” administration budget aide Keith Fontenot told health-care activists last night. Obama is “open to any ideas people want to put forward. He wants to work openly with the Congress in a very inclusive process.”

Virtually every major player in the health-care sector will find something to object to in Obama’s plan, an intentional decision made in the hope that “a little bit of pain” will be offset by the appeal of insuring millions more people, said one White House adviser.

About half the money for the new fund would come by capping itemized tax deductions for Americans in the top income bracket. The proposal, which administration officials characterize as a “shared-responsibility issue,” would reduce the value of tax deductions for families earning more than $250,000 by about 20 percent, according to administration documents.

Nearly one-third of the money would be generated by eliminating subsidies that the government pays insurers that sell Medicare managed-care plans. Instead, the Medicare Advantage plans would be put under a competitive bidding process, for a savings of $175 billion over the next decade.

“The administration believes it’s time to stop this waste,” according to the documents.

Even before the budget proposal became public, the Obama team began selling it to groups that will be central to the upcoming debate. Top lawmakers were brought to the White House for briefings, while constituency groups heard the highlights in an evening conference call yesterday.

“This is the first step towards getting health-care reform done this year,” White House domestic policy adviser Melody C. Barnes told allies in one call. “We can’t underestimate the importance of rallying around this budget. It serves as a footprint for something bigger.”

During the campaign, Obama promised to reduce the number of uninsured Americans, improve the quality of care and save the typical family $2,500 a year in medical costs.

“We know that this is not enough to achieve our overall goal of getting health care for every American, but it is a significant down payment,” Neera Tanden, a top Obama health adviser, said during a conference call.

Given the economic crisis and the soaring federal deficit, many had begun to fear that health reform would be postponed, said Drew Altman, president of the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation.

“What this does is, it allows the train to move forward,” he said. “But there are still big issues to work out about how to reform health care and how to come up with the rest of the money.”

Many of the targeted savings are familiar and controversial.

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If the tax-deduction cap is enacted, it is likely to hit many small businesses, said House Republican Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio).

“Everyone agrees that all Americans deserve access to affordable health care,” he said, “but is increasing taxes during an economic recession, especially on small businesses, the right way to accomplish that goal?”

If the budget is approved by Congress, drug companies will be required to increase the rebate they pay on medications sold to Medicaid patients from 15 percent to 21 percent. The proposal, which would raise $19.5 billion over 10 years, is likely to spark strong opposition from the industry, which has argued that the current rebate cuts into profits.

Wealthy senior citizens would also be asked to pay higher premiums for Medicare drug coverage, similar to the higher premiums they now pay for physician visits, according to the Obama blueprint.

The budget figures also represent significant shifts in how the United States will pay for medical care.

For example, experts have identified hospital readmissions — especially for elderly patients — as a sign of poor care and unnecessary expense. About 18 percent of Medicare patients are readmitted to the hospital within 30 days of an original visit. The new approach would establish flat fees for the first hospitalization and 30 days of follow-up. Hospitals with high readmission rates would be paid less.

Obama, who is set to host a White House summit on health reform next week, has argued that reining in health spending is critical to the nation’s long-term fiscal outlook.

Medicare and Medicaid, the government’s two primary safety-net health programs, currently consume 5 percent of the gross domestic product, or $660 billion a year. At their current growth rates, absent restructuring, the two programs will equal 12 percent of the GDP by 2050.

Health-care costs are “one of the major reasons why small businesses close their doors and corporations ship jobs overseas,” Obama said in a speech to Congress on Tuesday night.

“This is a cost that now causes a bankruptcy in America every 30 seconds. By the end of the year, it could cause 1.5 million Americans to lose their homes,” he said. “. . . Given these facts, we can no longer afford to put health-care reform on hold.”

President Obama on Tuesday outlined an ambitious agenda that requires “significant resources,” even as he aims to halve the deficit by the end of his first term.

In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, Obama said it’s time to act boldly not just to revive the economy, but “to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity.”

“While the cost of action will be great, I can assure you that the cost of inaction will be far greater,” he said.

The president struck an optimistic tone, asserting that “we will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.”

Obama focused on the three priorities of the budget he will present to Congress later this week: energy, health care and education.

The president said he sees his budget as a “vision for America — as a blueprint for our future,” but not something that will solve every problem or address every issue.

“It reflects the stark reality of what we’ve inherited — a trillion dollar deficit, a financial crisis, and a costly recession,” he said.

Obama said his administration already has identified $2 trillion in government spending cuts that can be made over the next decade.

The president touted the $787 billion stimulus plan he signed into law last week, saying it will invest in areas critical to the country’s economic recovery. He also made bold promises for what these investments will achieve.

Obama predicted that because of the recovery plan, the United States will double its supply of renewable energy in the next three years.

He also said the country will invest $15 billion a year to develop technology for green energy.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who delivered the Republican response to Obama, blasted the Democrats’ stimulus plan, saying, “while some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending.” Read: Jindal calls stimulus “irresponsible”

Obama also pledged a “historic commitment” to health care and said the recovery plan could lead to a cure for cancer. He also promised the “largest investment ever” in preventive care.

On education, Obama set a goal of having the highest college graduation rate in the world by 2020.

He pointed to the billions for education — from early childhood education expansion to college-loan programs — in the economic stimulus package to ensure that every child has access to education “from the day they are born to the day they begin a career.”

Obama also said his budget will pay for more soldiers and Marines, increase their pay and expand veterans health care and benefits. iReport.com: How are you coping with the economy?

Obama said the recovery plans already in the works are immediate steps to revive the economy in the short-term, “but the only way to fully restore America’s economic strength is to make the long-term investments that will lead to new jobs, new industries, and a renewed ability to compete with the rest of the world.”

“Slowly, but surely, confidence will return, and our economy will recover,” he said, asking Congress to join him in “doing whatever proves necessary because we cannot consign our nation to an open-ended recession.”

Obama promised to reform the regulatory system to “ensure that a crisis of this magnitude never happens again.”

The president also signaled that he was willing to take on entitlements, saying that Congress must take on the growing costs of Medicare and Social Security.

Obama described the nation’s financial woes as a “reckoning” for poor decisions made by both government and individuals.

“A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future,” Obama said.

“Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.”

Noting that is easy to “become cynical and doubtful,” Obama said he has learned that “hope is found in unlikely places.”

Obama avoided lofty rhetoric and instead used examples of specific people to personalize his points.

He mentioned Leonard Abess and Ty’Sheoma Bethea — two of the Obamas’ invited guests. Read: Who did the Obamas invite?

Abess is a bank president from Miami, Florida, who reportedly cashed out of his company, took a $60 million bonus and distributed it among people who had worked for him.

Bethea is an eighth-grade girl from South Carolina who, in a letter to lawmakers, asked for help for her school and said, “We are not quitters.”

While the economy was the focus of the speech, Obama also touched on foreign policy.

The president said he’ll soon be laying out specifics on how to win the war in Afghanistan and end the one in Iraq.

“We are now carefully reviewing our policies in both wars, and I will soon announce a way forward in Iraq that leaves Iraq to its people and responsibly ends this war,” he said.

Meanwhile, he said, both Afghanistan and its border with Pakistan will remain a key focus.

Because Obama’s presidency is just a month old, the speech is not technically considered a State of the Union address. The annual State of the Union speech is delivered in the House of Representatives before members of both the House and the Senate as well as the justices of the Supreme Court, the president’s Cabinet and international dignitaries.

After a string of costly bailout and stimulus measures, President Obama will set a goal this week of cutting the annual deficit at least in half by the end of his term, administration officials said. The reduction would come in large part through Iraq troop withdrawals and higher taxes on the wealthy.

Mr. Obama’s budget outline, which he will release on Thursday, will also confirm his intention to deliver this year on ambitious campaign promises on health care and energy policy.

Mr. Obama inherited a deficit for 2009 of about $1.2 trillion, which will rise to more than $1.5 trillion, given initial spending from his recently enacted stimulus package. His budget blueprint for the 2010 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, will include a 10-year projection showing the annual deficit declining to $533 billion in the 2013 fiscal year, the last year of his term, officials said. A reduction of that magnitude would more than meet Mr. Obama’s deficit reduction goal.

Measured against the size of the economy, that would mean a reduction from a deficit equal to more than 10 percent of gross domestic product — larger than any deficit since World War II — to 3 percent, which is the level that economists generally consider sustainable. Mr. Obama will project deficits at about that level through 2019, aides said.

In his weekly radio and Internet address on Saturday, Mr. Obama said his first budget was “sober in its assessments, honest in its accounting, and lays out in detail my strategy for investing in what we need, cutting what we don’t, and restoring fiscal discipline.”

“We can’t generate sustained growth without getting our deficits under control,” he added.

The president will propose to tax the investment income of hedge fund and private equity partners at ordinary income tax rates, which are now as high as 35 percent and could return to 39.6 percent under Mr. Obama’s plans, instead of at the capital gains rate, which is 15 percent at most.

Senior Democrats in Congress joined with Republicans in 2007 to oppose that increase. But with Wall Street discredited and lucrative executive compensation a political target, the provision could prove more popular among lawmakers.

Mr. Obama will also call for letting the Bush tax cuts on income, dividends and capital gains lapse after 2010 for individuals who make more than $250,000 a year. As a candidate, Mr. Obama called for immediately repealing those tax cuts; he decided instead to keep them in place through 2010, as scheduled, reflecting the widespread belief that raising taxes further depresses economic activity.

As for war costs, Mr. Obama’s campaign projected that withdrawing combat troops from Iraq would save about $90 billion a year. But it is not clear how much any savings would be offset by increased spending in Afghanistan, where Mr. Obama has ordered an additional 17,000 troops, bringing the total there to 56,000.

The budget will provide the first clues to how Mr. Obama will reassert fiscal discipline after signing into law a $787 billion economic recovery plan. As difficult as cutting the deficits will be, much of the reduction by the end of his term will simply reflect an end to spending from the two-year stimulus package and — assuming the economy recovers — higher tax revenues and lower expenditures for safety-net programs like unemployment compensation.

Mr. Obama will propose cutting a variety of programs, including the Medicare Advantage subsidies for insurance companies that cover seniors who can otherwise acquire health coverage directly from the government. Another target is spending on private contractors, especially for defense, which spiked during the Bush administration. And he will scale back some promises, including his proposal to double money for foreign aid.

The budget on Thursday will come amid a week of reminders of the nation’s fiscal plight. On Monday Mr. Obama will hold a “fiscal responsibility summit” at the White House with members of Congress from both parties, economists, union leaders and business representatives. On Tuesday he will make a televised address to a joint session of Congress — the equivalent of a State of the Union speech for a new president — that advisers said would focus on the economy. Meanwhile, Congress will debate $410 billion in overdue appropriations for this fiscal year.

Yet Mr. Obama will inflate his challenge by forsaking several gimmicks that President Bush used to make deficits look smaller. He will include war costs in the budget; Mr. Bush did not, and instead sought supplemental money from Congress each year. Mr. Obama also will not count savings from laws that establish lower Medicare payments for doctors and expand the alternative minimum tax to hit more taxpayers — both of which Mr. Bush and Congress routinely took credit for, while knowing they would later waive the laws to raise doctors’ payments and limit the reach of the tax.

Full details of Mr. Obama’s budget for the 2010 fiscal year will be released in April. The outline on Thursday will make clear that he intends to push ahead this year on promises to contain health care costs and expand insurance coverage, and to move toward an energy cap-and-trade system for controlling emissions of gases blamed for climate change.

“The president believes there are essentially three areas that have to move forward even as we pare back elsewhere — health care, energy and education,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser. “These are the bulwark of a strong economy moving forward.”

While some people have predicted that Mr. Obama would have to shelve his priorities given rising deficits, his determination to proceed, especially on health care, reflects his economic advisers’ conviction that the government cannot control its finances without reforming health care. The ballooning cost of health care, and thus Medicare and Medicaid, is the biggest factor behind projections of unsustainable deficits in coming decades.

“He wants to present an honest budget, he wants to focus on health care, and he will cut the deficit by at least half by the end of his first term,” Peter R. Orszag, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said in an interview.

Mr. Obama will suggest in his budget that expanding health coverage to the more than 46 million uninsured can be done without adding to the deficit, both by making cost-saving changes in the delivery of care and by raising revenues. Advisers declined to identify the tax source.

Changes to the health care system will require investments in disease prevention programs, health information technology and research on cost-effective treatments, among other steps. Some money was included in the stimulus package. Even so, many health analysts believe big savings cannot be realized soon.

On energy policy, Mr. Obama’s budget will show new revenues by 2012 from his proposal to require companies to buy permits from the government for greenhouse gas emissions above a certain cap. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that would rise to $300 billion a year by 2020.

Since companies would pass their costs on to customers, Mr. Obama would have the government use most of the revenues for relief to families to offset higher utility bills and related expenses. The remaining revenues would cover his proposals for $15 billion a year in spending and tax incentives to develop alternative energy.

Obama Zeroes In on Health-Care Coverage With Stimulus Signed

President Barack Obama will use the budget proposal he submits to Congress next week to outline how to pay for expanding medical coverage to all Americans, said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Obama, on Feb. 24, will speak to a joint gathering of the House and Senate. Two days later, he will submit his budget plan to lawmakers.

The push from Obama will help Congress get to work on the overhaul, said Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat. The president is acting without a Health and Human Services secretary and chief aide for health policy, positions Thomas A. Daschle were supposed to fill before his withdrawal over questions about his taxes. Wyden said Obama’s readiness to move the week after he signed a $787 billion stimulus measure shows the importance of health care to economic growth.

“What the president is saying is you can’t get the economy back on track until you get healthcare on track,” said Wyden, a member of the Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over U.S. government health programs, and sponsor of a coverage proposal. The budget will help “set the table for health reform,” he said in an interview yesterday.

Obama campaigned on a promise to expand government health programs and give people subsidies to help them afford coverage. He also proposed creating a public plan to compete with private health insurers and taking steps, such as putting more health records in digital form, to help reduce costs.

Health Insurance, Costs

One American in seven lacks health insurance, according to the Census Bureau. For those with coverage, the price rose an average of 5 percent last year, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation in Menlo Park, California, reported in September.

Obama said during his campaign that covering everyone might cost at least $65 billion a year. His then-Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, now secretary of State, estimated her plan would cost about $110 billion. Clinton’s plan included a requirement that everyone have health insurance. Obama’s didn’t.

David Sloane, a lobbyist with AARP, the advocacy group for older people, said determining who pays is critical.

“Given all other spending priorities and economic peril, there’s a lot of uncertainty whether they can find savings elsewhere to offset this,” Sloane said in a telephone interview on Feb. 19.

Obama’s plans already got a boost in the stimulus package, which he signed Feb. 17. The measure allocates $20 billion to encourage adoption of computerized records and gives $1 billion to research the comparative effectiveness of medical treatments. Both may save money later on, according to the Congressional Budget Office, an arm of Congress.

Bush’s Footsteps

President George W. Bush successfully used his budget to push a new health program. He devoted two sentences in his fiscal year 2002 budget proposal to create a program to subsidize prescription drug coverage for people in Medicare, the U.S. health insurance plan for the elderly and disabled. Congress approved it in 2003.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Finance Committee, have been working on legislation to overhaul the health system.

Chris Jennings, a Democratic consultant who was a senior staffer on former President Bill Clinton’s health-care task force, said Obama may try to focus on health care when he gives his speech to Congress.

President Barack Obama on Wednesday signed into law a bill expanding the coverage of a health care program for uninsured children.

Obama signed the $32.8-billion State Children’s Heath Insurance Program (SCHIP) bill at the White House after it was passed by Congress via a 290-135 vote early in the day. The Senate passed the bill, 66-32, last week.

The expanded SCHIP, one of the promises of Obama during his presidential campaign, will cover four million more uninsured kids for a total of 11 million beneficiaries in the next four-and-a-half years.

The program launched 12 years ago was supposed to expire next month. Democrats tried to expand its coverage during the Bush administration but failed as the bill was vetoed for being too expensive.

President Barack Obama on Wednesday imposed $500,000 caps on senior executive pay for the most distressed financial institutions receiving federal bailout money, saying Americans are upset with “executives being rewarded for failure.”
Obama announced the dramatic new government intervention into corporate America at the White House, with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at his side. The president said the executive-pay limits are a first step, to be followed by the unveiling next week of a sweeping new framework for spending what remains of the $700 billion financial industry bailout that Congress created last year.

And he continued to fight for his stimulus package, arguing that “a failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe.”