Obama's press conference on healthcare: a great snake oil salesman

The speech and answers were slick but largely unspecific and, where specific, misrepresenting claims. It sounds great to claim lower costs, universal coverage, better quality and no effect on the deficit but it's all hogwash.
1) The claim that "2/3 of the cost" will come from saving on waste is unbelievable. Everyone knows that every program, government programs especially, has waste; saying it, however, has never resulted in eliminating waste unless specific things have been identified.
2) The claim that AARP, the American Medical Association, The Pharma industry, the nurses have endorsed "his" plan. He holds up Mayo Clinic and The Cleveland Clinic as models that he aspires to. It's hard to see how anyone has endorsed a plan since he answered every criticism of "it" by saying that the House plan ( with 1000 pages that few if any have read ) is superseded by later developments ( unspecified ). It seems, moreover, that the endorsements are overdone since several of them have been blackmailed by threatening worse ( even further diminishment of payment to doctors; even more screws put to the drug industry ). The AMA, by the way, is no longer representative of most doctors and even the endorsers ( of phantom plans ) will retreat when it turns out that Obama will not deliver on his various implicit promises.
3) The savings will not be forthcoming except that reduced reimbursements will be extorted from either or both of the constituencies of patients or healthcare givers. The specific thought that "repetitive tests" will be avoided is specious as is the claim that information management will produce noticeable savings. Most healthcare institutions and their associated insurance companies have already computerized all tests and records for efficient sharing by members of the "medical team." It is a total fiction that enough FIXABLE waste remains in the system.
4) Obama fails to address a salient problem, that of rampant medical malpractice lawsuits. While actual payments amount to "only" 1% of healthcare costs ( with 40% going to tort lawyers ) the effect on medicine being "defensive" is vastly greater. The tort lawyers will not accept a defense that hewing to customary standards of care is sufficient to avoid malpractice charges. Despite the citations of the number of medical (malpractice) mistakes, the citers never mention what percentage of the time legitimate cases are NOT taken by tort lawyers (because they are difficult) and how many judgments are unjustifiable by the facts ( e.g. the breast implants morass, the asbestosis/silicosis mass fraud ).
5) The claim that the American system makes Americans no healthier than others is false. We get access to tests, drugs, procedures and prostheses that are unavailable to those elsewhere. The comparisons of longevity and infant death are biased by the diverse populations we have relative to such homogeneous groups as Sweden and Japan and by different definitions of what "infant mortality" means.
6) In addition to the non-mention of tort lawyers, there was the non-mention of "pork" insurance like requiring insurance for chiropractors, midwives, acupuncturists, aromatherapists, massage therapists and various other fictional healthcare that happens to have a strong state lobby.Obama should have been asked about NO EVIDENCE AT ALL existing for the efficacy of chiropractic in treating back pain while Illinois has laws mandating chiropractic coverage.
Prior to the healthcase discussion, Obama boasted of the many jobs "created or saved" without acknowledging that this is an unspecific number and that the net unemployment has gone up enormously. He cited the $1.22 Billion savings from killing the F-22 program while the deficits are in the $7.1TRILLION range and healthcare alone has been scored by the Congressional Budget Office to be $1.6Trillion over ten years.
Savings from Medicare and MediAid can only come from paying healthcare providers less or limiting care for patients or both. It is highly likely that any of these plans will result in fewer healthcare providers at the very time the number of potential patients is expanded.
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