Corrected at 10:32 a.m. on March 31.

After President Obama this morning likened his health insurance exchange to an idea proposed by the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank's president, Edwin Feulner, took "great exception" to "this misuse of our work and abuse of our name."

Appearing on NBC's "Today Show," Obama explained his insurance exchange as "being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market, [an idea] that originated from The Heritage Foundation."

Not so, Feulner said in a press release. "True exchanges are simply a market mechanism to enable families to choose their health insurance," he said. "President Obama's exchanges, by contrast, are a vehicle to introduce sweeping regulation and federal standardization on health insurance."

Michael Franc, vice president of government relations for the think tank, said Heritage has been proposing health care reform options, providing research and appointing groups to give in-depth analysis on the subject since 1989.

"We've probably published several hundred critiques and analyses both pro and con on various items over the course of a year and a half," Franc said.

Although Feulner called this "the latest act in a campaign to sell this big-government program as a moderate law that incorporates conservative ideas," he added there could be a possibility Obama had his facts crossed.

"The idea of an exchange is something we touted a long time ago, but we weren't the ones who invented it," said Franc. "The origins of the exchange was really the federal employee benefits system."

The foundation says it has written 50 to 70 papers on how this "free market" insurance exchange can be applied to other parts of the health care sector.

"The key thing here is that the president says that the exchange in the new law somehow mimics the kind of things we've written about for two decades," Franc said, but Obama's exchange "brings with it all sorts of very draconian regulations, none of which we would ever endorse."

CORRECTION: The original version of this report misspelled Michael Franc's name.