Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MA) clashed with Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) on Sunday over the claim that President Barack Obama’s health care reform law had crippled 85 percent of the insurance market to help a “few” uninsured Americans.
“You’re punishing these people,” Rogers told NBC host David Gregory. “Here’s the problem, you have 15 percent of the population that didn’t have health insurance when this started, roughly — and we think that number was high, we think it was closer to 10. So what they’ve done is disrupted it for the 85 percent that had health care. And their costs are going up significantly.”
“So we’ve broken the system to help a few,” he insisted. “Nobody would fix a problem that way.”
Gregory attempted to “leave the debate there,” but Van Hollen interrupted.
“He just put out so much misinformation in 2 seconds that I can’t answer,” Van Hollen complained.
“Alright, quick response,” Gregory relented.
“The reality is that it hasn’t messed up 80 percent of the market,” Van Hollen explained. “The individual market, which has always been broken, represents about 5 percent of the market. A lot of those people were losing their health care on an annual basis before. We’re trying to fix that.”
According to a recent U.S. Census Bureau report, 48 million Americans were uninsured in 2012. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that 25 million of those people will be covered by 2023 because of the new law.
Alan: 48 million uninsured number does not includes tens of millions of Americans who are grossly underinsured and therefore at risk of bankruptcy which in these United States is most often caused by unpayable medical expenses.
Watch this video NBC’s Meet the Press, broadcast Dec. 1, 2013.
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