Robert Donachie, DCNF

The New York Times opinion page claimed Thursday that President Donald Trump has outright lied 85 more times in his first year in office than former President Barack Obama did during his eight years as president.

“In his first 10 months in office, he (Trump) has told 103 separate untruths, many of them repeatedly. Obama told 18 over his entire eight-year tenure. That’s an average of about two a year for Obama and about 124 a year for Trump,” according to the Times’ op-ed.

The Times states that their definition of the word “lie,” as it pertains to the article, is “demonstrably false statements.”

Keeping with the newspaper’s definition, here are a few more Obama lies that the Times left-out.

1) Obama 2009:

“I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter because, frankly, we historically have had a employer-based system in this country with private insurers, and for us to transition to a system like that I believe would be too disruptive,” Obama said at a 2009 New Hampshire town hall.

In a video recorded at an Obama fundraising event hosted by the AFL-CIO in 2003, Obama expressed his support for a single-payer healthcare system. The former president told the crowd, “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal healthcare plan.”

2) Obama 2012: ‘Your Premiums Will Go Down’

The other thing we’ve done is to say, what are the critical needs of small business? A lot of time, one of the biggest challenges is to make sure that you, as a sole proprietor, that you can get health insurance for you and your family. So when you hear about the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — and I don’t mind the name because I really do care. That’s why we passed it. You should know that once we have fully implemented, you’re going to be able to buy insurance through a pool so that you can get the same good rates as a group that if you’re an employee at a big company you can get right now — which means your premiums will go down. – Obama

Premiums for both Obamacare and employer-based health insurance plans increased steadily after Obama’s 2012 statement.

Employer-based health insurance premiums went up over $4,000 from the time Obama took office in 2008 to 2014. The growth of premiums for family coverage grew at an average rate of 5 percent a year from 2010 to 2015, according to a 2016 Kaiser Family Foundation and Journal of the American Medical Association study.

Premiums for plans sold on the Obamacare state exchanges increased dramatically during Obama’s time in the White House, particularly during his second term.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a report in May 2017 comparing premiums in the exchange marketplaces in 2013, one year before Obamacare regulations took full effect, to premiums in the exchange marketplace in 2017.

The report found that average monthly premiums increased from $224 in 2013 to $476 in 2014. That constitutes a 105 percent increase in only 4 years.

The Obama administration later conceded the fact that premiums were rising in 2016.

The administration announced in October 2016 that insurance premiums would rise by double-digit percentages in 2017. During the same announcement, Obamacare enrollees learned that around 20 percent of consumers, or one in five, will only have one insurer to choose from in the marketplace.

3) Obama 2017: ‘Healthcare Costs Are Rising At The Slowest Rate In 50 Years’

“Today, the economy is growing again; wages, incomes, home values, and retirement accounts are rising again; poverty is falling again. The wealthy are paying a fairer share of taxes even as the stock market shatters records. The unemployment rate is near a 10-year low. The uninsured rate has never, ever been lower. Healthcare costs are rising at the slowest rate in 50 years,” Obama said in a 2017 speech in Chicago.

While giving his farewell address to a crowd in Chicago in January 2017, Obama claimed that health care costs “are rising at the slowest rate in 50 years.”

The statement is definitively false, considering that U.S. health care spending began growing at a faster rate in 2014 than it had in well over a decade.

Health care spending rose 5.3 percent in 2014, accelerating from an average growth rate of 3.7 percent for the previous half decade. From 2008 to 2013, national health care spending never increased more than 4.5 percent on a year-to-year basis.

The trend continued in 2015, increasing 5.8 percent.

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) expects national health care spending to grow at an average annual rate of 5.6 percent through 2025.

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