Health care legislation will “probably include some additional revenue from well-to-do people,” President Obama said in a Today show interview with Meredith Vieira that aired this morning.
“It’s not punishing the rich,” Obama said. “The way I look at it is, if I can afford to do a little bit more so that a whole bunch of families out there have a little more security, when I already have security, that’s part of being a community.”
The president also claimed that, despite the “hew and cry” that he’s a tax-and-spend Democrat, “the only tax change I’ve made is to cut people’s taxes.”
That’s not exactly true. In March, Obama signed a law upping the cigarette tax by 62 cents a pack.
Obama said the Congressional Budget Office has looked at some of his administration’s health care proposals, “and they’ve said, you know, this has a good chance of working.”
The CBO has said the proposed House bill won’t cut health care costs. Obama said some of his proposals haven’t been adopted by Congress yet.
According to the president, the CBO is saying that “the cost savings that are in those bills right now, some of them may work, but they’re not enough to offset the additional costs of bringing in 46 million new people.”
“I’m actually optimistic,” he went on, “that at the end of the day we will have a bill that assures we’re driving down costs over the long term, and in the short term, people have more security.”
