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President Barack Obama did not utter any of the statements reproduced above; the quoted example is a bit of fictional dialogue excerpted from a satirical piece by conservative humorist John Semmens which was published on his site on 21 March 2009. The basis of Mr. Semmens' satire was that, in conjunction with meeting with several veterans groups in March 2009, the Obama administration floated a proposal to save the federal government an estimated $540 million per year by billing veterans' private insurance companies for the treatment of their combat injuries and other service-related health problems. (Currently only non-service-related medical treatments are so billed.) The proposal would not have, as was often misreported, forced veterans to pay for the treatment of their injuries out of their own pockets or required them to buy private insurance; but it did raise the prospect that injured or ill veterans might find it harder or more expensive to purchase health coverage, or to obtain employment in the private sector if employer-funded private insurance plans had to cover the additional costs of treating injuries and other service-related health problems. The plan was heavily criticized by veterans almost from the moment it was presented to them, as the Washington Post reported in an account of a meeting between President Obama and veterans' groups: Within 48 hours, the White House announced that the proposal had been dropped, but the President still came in for his fair share of criticism from those who maintained that he failed to anticipate how his proposal would be received and should have known better than to even raise the subject: A Newsday editorial summed up many Americans' feelings about the matter in opining that:
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