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The Health Care Bill is the Ball Game
The Health Care Bill is the Ball Game
By Mona Charen
You might suppose that President Obama has his hands full running two wars, administering General Motors, "rescuing" the banking system, attempting to empower unions over management, hushing up whispers about hypocrisy regarding Guantanamo detainees, managing the mortgage crisis, imposing "clean energy" on the nation, handling nuclear North Korea and nearly nuclear Iran, "stimulating" the economy, reviving the "peace process" between Palestinians and Israelis, inaugurating a new relationship with Russia and with the Muslim world, and reversing the rise of the world's oceans, but no, he has one more agenda item -- overhauling U.S. health care.
The administration is hoping that a health bill will be voted on by early August, which may be overly optimistic but still means that this summer will be dominated by the health care debate. Its outcome will determine the overall success or failure of Obama's effort to torque America toward the European model of statism. It isn't just that the health care sector accounts for 17 percent of the U.S. economy. It is also the case that if enacted, a nationalized health service -- no matter how crushingly expensive or bureaucratic -- will vitiate arguments about the proper scope of government. All future pleas for reducing the size of the state will run into the accusation that the small government advocate is eager to take antibiotics from the mouth of a child or insulin from a diabetic.
Whereas the Clinton administration advertised the overhaul of American health care primarily as a means of covering the uninsured, President Obama is making the bolder claim that revamping health care is a way to save money. Really? Medicare is already the program that ate the government, scheduled to go into bankruptcy itself in 2019. As the trustees report put it, "while Medicare's annual costs were 3.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2008, or about three quarters of Social Security's, they are projected to surpass Social Security expenditures in 2028 and reach 11.4 percent of GDP in 2083." Or consider the Massachusetts health care reform introduced by Mitt Romney. Like every other government health care program, Romney's has vastly exceeded cost projections. Initially projected at $125 million per year, the program actually cost taxpayers $133 million in 2007, $647 million in 2008, $869 million in 2009, and could top $1.1 billion next year.
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Pay as you go -- except for health care
Obama: It's OK to borrow to pay for health care
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama on Tuesday proposed budget rules that would allow Congress to borrow tens of billions of dollars and put the nation deeper in debt to jump-start the administration's emerging health care overhaul. The "pay-as-you-go" budget formula plan is significantly weaker than a proposal Obama issued with little fanfare last month.
It would carve out about $2.5 trillion worth of exemptions for Obama's priorities over the next decade. His health care reform plan also would get a green light to run big deficits in its early years. But over a decade, Congress would have to come up with money to cover those early year deficits.
Obama's latest proposal for addressing deficits urges Congress to pass a law requiring lawmakers to pay for new spending programs and tax cuts without further adding to exploding deficits projected to total about $10 trillion over the next decade.
If new spending or tax reductions are not offset, there would be automatic cuts in so-called mandatory programs — although Social Security payments and the Medicaid health care program for poor and disabled would be exempt and cuts to Medicare would be sharply limited.
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