Health Concerns
Claim: Statement reproduces President Obama's response regarding opposition to his veterans' health insurance plan.
Example: [Collected via e-mail, April 2009]
I received this in an e-mail. Is this true, did Obama say this?
HERE IS HIS RESPONSE WHEN HE BACKED OFF FROM HIS DECISION TO LET THE MILITARY PAY FOR THEIR WAR INJURIES
The President admitted that he was puzzled by the magnitude of the opposition to his proposal. "Look, it's an all volunteer force," Obama complained. "Nobody made these guys go to war. They had to have known and accepted the risks. Now they whine about bearing the costs of their choice? It doesn't compute."
"I thought these were people who were proud to sacrifice for their country," Obama continued. "I wasn't asking for
blood — just money. With the country facing the worst financial crisis in its history, I'd have thought that the patriotic thing to do would be to try to help reduce the nation's deficit. I guess I underestimated the selfishness of some of my fellow Americans."
Origins: This item is another entry difficult to classify as either "true" or "false." It's false in the literal sense that President Barack Obama did not utter the words attributed to him above; this piece is an excerpt from a form of satire that makes political or social points by putting outrageous words into the mouths of others.
However, if the same sentiments had been cast in the third person (rather than as a faux quote from President Obama), they couldn't be dismissed as completely false. They're an expression of the outrage many people felt about a very real issue, a plan the Obama
administration floated in
March 2009 to save an estimated
$540 million per year by requiring veterans with private medical insurance to use that insurance to cover the costs of treatment for combat injuries and other service-related health problems. (With a few exceptions, veterans are currently responsible only for health care costs incurred for reasons unrelated to their military service.) Among other issues, the proposal raised the prospect that injured or ill veterans might find it more difficult to obtain employment in the private sector if employer-funded private insurance had to pay for their health care.
The plan was heavily criticized by many veterans and veterans' groups, especially those who "believe that upon enlistment, the government pledged lifetime coverage for injuries sustained on the battlefield or elsewhere." And, as reported in the
Boston Herald, it seemed to many observers that the Obama administration had been caught completely unaware that its proposal would meet with such vehement and outspoken opposition:
However, many said that they were surprised by the ham-handedness of the private insurance effort because it seemed that no one in the White House or the [Veterans Administration] took into consideration how veterans would react — or Congress, where several members called the plan "dead on arrival."
"The president needs to drop this," [Paul] Rieckhoff [executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America] said of Obama. "The longer we wait, the more it hurts his relations with the [veterans service organizations] and with vets. This is a no-brainer. We were all shocked. We don't understand why he's picking this fight."
A Newsday editorial summed up many Americans' feelings about the matter in opining that: This load-shedding device would have saved the government about $540 million. But whoever proposed it to Obama was politically tone-deaf.
To Obama's credit, he appears to have backed away from this insensitive proposal. But veterans still can't figure out how he let someone in the administration persuade him to try it. Frankly, neither can we.
As we've noted many times before, satire that hits too close to its mark is often mistaken for real news. In this case, it appears that the Obama administration took such a large misstep that it left some people wondering whether the president might really have been callous enough to offer the response attributed to him above.
Last updated: 2 July 2009
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