(Washington, D.C.) – The nation’s premier taxpayer watchdog group, the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW), reacted with dismay and alarm to President Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress last evening on healthcare reform.  Despite widespread protests at town hall meetings across the country and vociferous taxpayer opposition to any further intrusion by the federal government into the nation’s healthcare sector, the President used the address to burnish his commitment to a radical, overly-bureaucratic, and costly plan that would insert the federal government even further into the healthcare sector without driving costs down or delivering better health outcomes.

“The President and his Democratic allies in the House and Senate turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to the voices of millions of taxpayers, who sent clear signals to their elected officials over the August recess that they reject the wasteful, hyper-partisan healthcare reform plans that have been hastily cobbled together in Congress,” said CCAGW President Tom Schatz.  “Once again, the President has misdiagnosed the problem, preferring to demonize health insurers and others who oppose his wasteful, expensive plan.  Apparently, the only thing that matters is that the federal government be given more control over our healthcare decisions.”

The President continued to claim that he will not sign a healthcare reform bill unless it is “deficit-neutral,” even though the plans that have been promulgated in Congress are all expected to cost at least $1 trillion and have been scored by the Congressional Budget Office as pushing up deficits by more than $220 billion over ten years.  The President continued to claim that those who like their current insurance and doctors would not be forced to give them up, refusing to acknowledge several studies that say otherwise, including one by the Lewin Group that estimates that under the House plan (H.R. 3200) as many as 83 million Americans will lose their employer-based insurance coverage and be forced into the government-run alternative.  The President continued to claim that he can pay for his plan by squeezing waste from the current system, even though his plan creates dozens of new federal bureaucracies, boards, and panels and Congress has abjectly failed to wring waste out of the current Medicare and Medicaid systems.  The President continued to claim that he supports choice and competition, yet his plan would reduce choice by having the federal government set arbitrary coverage standards and drive some insurers out of the marketplace.

“The President persists in talking out of both sides of his mouth and taxpayers are sick of getting an earful of contradictory and conflicting information,” concluded Schatz.  “It is unlikely that their justifiable anger and mistrust were mollified by another speech filled with scolding and platitudes.  When the President noted that 90 percent of the healthcare market in Alabama is controlled by one insurance company, his solution was not to open health insurance to interstate competition, it was to insert the government into the marketplace.  It is time for Congress to start over and craft health insurance reforms that are market and patient-oriented.”

CCAGW is the lobbying arm of Citizens Against Government Waste, the nation’s largest nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government.