Fresh off revelations he offered disgraced South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford kid glove treatment in exchange for an exclusive interview, ABC's Jake Tapper has once again committed journalistic malpractice. The President's pledge to Americans that under his health care proposals "you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan" isn't literally true, Tapper insists, because employers could still change or drop coverage altogether for their workers. Of course, Tapper ignores that employer-provided health care is already disappearing at an alarming rate, leaving millions of Americans with no choice - and no insurance.
In their piece provocatively titled, "President Obama continues questionable 'you can keep your health care' promise," Tapper and ABC colleague Sunlen Miller take the President to task for claiming, "if you've got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan." But as Obama has made clear time and again, when he says, "nobody is talking about taking that away from you," the President is referring to the government, an obvious effort to debunk a Republican talking point dating back to the demise of the Clinton health care debacle.
The ABC piece admits as much, even as it slammed Obama for still "making a promise about health care reform that he has acknowledged isn't literally true":

But last month, as the president acknowledged during a press conference, he doesn't literally mean that you are guaranteed to be able to keep your health care plan, and your doctor, if and when health care reform passes.
"When I say 'If you have your plan and you like it,... or you have a doctor and you like your doctor, that you don't have to change plans,'" the president said after we asked him about this, "what I'm saying is the government is not going to make you change plans under health reform."
Importantly, the government might create circumstances - say, a public health care option that is less expensive since profit is not a concern and overhead is lower - where you might find your business forcing you into that public plan.

But while Tapper is playing semantic games, American employers are shedding health insurance coverage at an accelerating rate.
A November 2007 study revealed the continuing and steady decline of employer-based health coverage in the United States. Once the lynchpin of the U.S. health care system, workplace health insurance now covers only 59.7% of Americans, down from 64.2% in 2000. And making matters worse, surging health care costs, insurance premiums and employees' own contributions continue to exceed inflation and the growth in wages.
The report from the Economic Policy Institute, "The Erosion of Employment-based Insurance," paints a bleak picture for working Americans. Overall, 47 million people (15.8%) in the U.S. had no health insurance in 2006, up 8 million from 2000 when 13.7% were without coverage. Helping to fuel that dramatic increase is the drop-off in employer-provided insurance, which dropped 4.5 percentage points over the same period resulting in 2.3 million more Americans without medical coverage. (Unsurprisingly, the rates of workplace insurance coverage are generally lowest in those red states represented by Republicans in Congress.)
And for those workers who still have employer-provided insurance, they will soon be paying much more for it.
A new report from the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers forecast employers will face a 9% increase in health insurance costs in 2010. 42% of those business surveyed will pass at least some the new burden on to their workers. As PWC's Michael Thompson concluded:

"If the underlying costs go up by 9%, employees' costs actually go up by double digits," he said, noting that will have a "major, major impact" when many employers also are freezing or cutting pay.

(As it stands now, the average annual tab for American families now tops $12,000. Of that, a recent analysis by the Center for American Progress found that "8 percent of families' 2009 health care premiums--approximately $1,100 a year--is due to our broken system that fails to cover the uninsured.")
For his part, President Obama acknowledged that under his proposals some businesses may seek to switch to the lower-cost public option. "There are a whole series of ways that we could design this," he said, to create a "disincentive" to limit such shifting. But for millions of Americans facing skyrocketing costs from their employers or losing coverage completely, the Democratic plan is the only hope they have.
As for Tapper, his omissions are, to quote his unctuous email to Mark Sanford, "slimy." And to be sure, his article was in "bad form."
UPDATE: To his credit, Jake Tapper responded at length to this piece. His comments and my follow up response are over at DailyKos, where this post also appeared.