Candidate Obama Pushed for Higher Taxes to Reform Healthcare

During President Obama's healthcare address to the nation last week, he said, "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits either now or in the future," and that most of his plan "can be paid for by finding savings within in the existing healthcare system."

Yet, presidential candidate Obama, speaking at a town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on April 3, 2007, said, "Conceivably, it is possible to capture those savings and apply them to provide coverage in theory, but transitioning a system is a very difficult and costly and lengthy enterprise."

Furthermore, as the following video uncovered by our friends at Naked Emperor News depicts, candidate Obama told attendees "that's why there have been a couple of times where I've pushed people on the idea of paying higher taxes in order to implement the system" (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript):

Estimates range from 20 percent to 30 percent of our healthcare dollars go into red tape, paperwork, profits for the private marketplace and so forth. Conceivably, it is possible to capture those savings and apply them to provide coverage in theory, but transitioning a system is a very difficult and costly and lengthy enterprise. It's not like you can turn on a switch and you go from one system to another. So, it's possible that up front you would need not just, you might need an additional 90 or 100 billion dollars a year to provide coverage with the understanding that you would capture savings over the long-term as the system transitions. And, and the question then becomes how do people feel about paying additional money? [....]

Let's say that we, let's say that I proposed a plan that moved to a single-payer system, let's say Medicare Plus, be essentially that everybody can buy into Medicare for example. It would cost a huge amount of money. [...]

We're going to have to come up with at least $15 billion in new money just to maintain the existing coverage that's provided to kids through the SCHIP program. There are an additional six million I believe children who are not covered but who would otherwise be eligible, we'd have to come up with some additional money to cover them, to make sure that every child has basic coverage. And, and I think it raises then the issue of cost. And that's why there have been a couple of times where I've pushed people on the idea of paying higher taxes in order to implement the system. [...]

And by the way, that's an area that we should be willing to make an investment upfront because there may be community hospitals in rural areas for example that can't afford to set up the computerization and the software system. The federal government should subsidize that initial process. [...]

You're right that Medicare and Medicaid oftentimes politicians use those two systems as a way of, as a sort of a safety valve budget, particularly at the state level. So what they do is if they get in a budget crunch, they will delay payments to doctors or the reimbursements won't be quite as high and force providers to suck up the costs. [...]

And one of the things that I want to find out is whether folks are actually ready to move off an employer-based system. This is how you get into trouble when you're president, you start saying, "We're going full speed ahead," and you look behind and nobody's behind you.

Wouldn't an honest media share this video and its contents with Americans comparing and contrasting what the President is currently saying versus what he said while on the stump?

Or would that be too much like journalism?