Obama Explains Health Care Bill and the Good it Will Do

I love this guy.

Here are highlights of Obama’s transcript:

Starting this year, thousands of uninsured Americans with preexisting conditions will be able to purchase health insurance, some for the very first time. (Applause.) Starting this year, insurance companies will be banned forever from denying coverage to children with preexisting conditions. (Applause.) Starting this year, insurance companies will be banned from dropping your coverage when you get sick. (Applause.) And they’ve been spending a lot of time weeding out people who are sick so they don’t have to pay benefits that people have already paid for. Those practices will end.

If you buy a new plan, there won’t be lifetime or restrictive annual limits on the amount of care you receive from your insurance companies. (Applause.) And by the way, to all the young people here today, starting this year if you don’t have insurance, all new plans will allow you to stay on your parents’ plan until you are 26 years old. (Applause.)

…for the first time, small business owners and people who are being priced out of the insurance market will have the same kind of choice of private health insurance that members of Congress give to themselves.

And if you still can’t afford the insurance in this new marketplace, even though it’s going to be cheaper than what you can get on your own, then we’re going to offer you tax credits to help you afford it -– tax credits that add up to the largest middle-class tax cut for health care in American history.

We’re going to set a new fee on insurance companies that stand to gain millions of new customers. (Applause.) So here’s the point: This proposal is paid for. Unlike some of these previous schemes in Washington, we’re not taking out the credit card in your name, young people, and charging it to you. We’re making sure this thing is paid for.

Americans who are buying comparable coverage in the individual market would end up seeing their premiums go down 14 to 20 percent. (Applause.) Americans who get their insurance through the workplace, cost savings could be as much as $3,000 less per employer than if we do nothing. Now, think about that. That’s $3,000 your employer doesn’t have to pay, which means maybe she can afford to give you a raise.

…you’ve got a whole bunch of opponents of this bill saying, well, we can’t afford this; we’re fiscal conservatives. These are the same guys who passed that prescription drug bill without paying for it, adding over $1 trillion to our deficit — “Oh, we can’t afford this.” But this bill, according to the Congressional Budget Office — which is the referee, the scorekeeper for how much things cost — says we’ll save us $1 trillion. Not only can we afford to do this, we can’t afford not to do this….