This weekend President Obama dedicated his weekly address to defending Congress’s plans for an overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

He argued, “Once you’ve seen enough ads and heard enough people yelling on TV you might begin to wonder whether there’s a grain of truth to what they are saying.”

Here’s the truth, brand-new analysis(pdf) from The Heritage Foundation — conducted by The Lewin Group— shows that the public plan component within the House Democrats’ health reform bill is in conflict with how the Congress and the President are selling their reform plan.

“If you like your health plan, you can keep it, the only thing that will change is that you’ll pay less.” Remember that? Well, according to the new Lewin study:

  • Approximately 103 million people would be covered under the new public plan and as a consequence about 83.4 million people would lose their private insurance. This would represent a 48.4 percent reduction in the number of people with private coverage.
  • About 88.1 million workers would see their current private, employer-sponsored health plan go away and would be shifted to the public plan.
  • Yearly premiums for the typical American with private coverage could go up by as much as $460 per privately insured person, as a result of increased cost-shifting stemming from a public plan modeled on Medicare.

So, is there truth in the way the President and Congress are advertising their plans?

In his address President Obama asserted that, “If you like your current insurance, you keep that insurance. Period. End of Story.” But what the President forgot to tell you is that his assertion is only true if the story were fiction.

President Obama has stated that any plan he’d sign must include a health insurance exchange with a public “option”. So, if you like your current insurance you may, in fact, lose it. Period. End of story.

Co-authored by Greg D’Angelo