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President Barack Obama on Friday staunchly defended wholesale government spying on the phone calls, emails and other communications of the American people.

Speaking to reporters in San Jose, California in advance of his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Obama referred to media exposés of secret data-collection programs by the Pentagon-based National Security Agency (NSA) that target hundreds of millions of Americans as “hype.”

He characterized the NSA's daily collection of telephone records of all customers of the major US telephone companies, first revealed Wednesday by the British Guardian newspaper, and the NSA and FBI's tapping into the servers of major Internet companies to access emails, photos, chats and documents, exposed Thursday by the Guardian and the Washington Post, as a “modest encroachment” on constitutionally protected privacy rights.

With the deadline for the full implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) set for January 1, 2014, it is becoming increasingly clear that what has been promoted as a progressive reform in fact constitutes a sweeping attack on health care for the vast majority of the American people.

On March 21, 2010, two days before signing the health care bill into law, Barack Obama declared that it represented “another stone firmly laid in the foundation of the American Dream.” More than three years later, this statement has been exposed as a cynical lie. From the beginning, the legislation has been crafted to serve the interests of private insurers, pharmaceuticals and giant health care chains, while cutting costs for corporations and the government, all at the expense of working families and the poor.

Global stock markets plunged Wednesday following the release of negative economic indicators pointing to a deepening slump in the United States, Europe and Asia and statements by US Federal Reserve officials suggesting a pull-back in monetary stimulus.

Japan’s stock market in particular, which had soared as a result of the Bank of Japan’s massive yen-printing program, suffered a sharp sell-off, falling 3.8 percent on Wednesday. The Nikkei Index was up 80 percent over the past year before it plunged more than 15 percent in the last ten trading days. Wednesday marked the index’s fifth daily fall of over three percent in two weeks.

The Japanese sell-off was followed by further stock losses in Europe, where the British FTSE 100 fell by 2 percent, the French CAC 40 declined 1.9 percent, the German DAX dropped 1.2 percent and the pan-European Eurofirst 300 index fell 1.5 percent.

With the full implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) less than seven months away, mounting evidence demonstrates that the health care reform signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010 will result in deep cutbacks in medical care, while raising costs for the vast majority of ordinary Americans.

At the same time, millions of the uninsured who were promised health coverage will be left out in the cold altogether. While working families and the poor face an uncertain future as far as their health care is concerned, private insurance companies are gearing up for steep increases in premiums as the medical benefits provided under their policies shrink.

The Obama administration’s health care overhaul will also reduce reimbursements to Medicare by more than $700 billion over 10 years, forcing drastic cutbacks to medical services and treatments for millions of American seniors who rely on the government program.