A Year of Magical Thinking. The Weekly Standard.
The health care reform the Democrats are intent upon passing before the year’s end because of some sort of emergency is really based upon their need to pass something to enable them to proclaim a bill passage to their supporters. A manufactured crisis with a manufactured deadline. Never mind the staggering cost expected to rise with time.
All on America’s tax paying wallets. WS.
The idea that expanding coverage will save the country money has always been a fantasy. True, the Congressional Budget Office found that, under certain assumptions that the authors of the legislation in effect required the CBO to make, the House and Senate health bills might not blow up the deficit over the next decade. But that won’t happen in the real world. For one thing, doctors’ reimbursements just aren’t going to be cut 20 percent.
The situation with respect to the long-term deficit is even worse. The Lewin Group, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and the government’s own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have all said that Obamacare won’t control costs in the long term. When the experts at Peterson and Lewin looked at the template for legislation now under debate in the Senate, they found that it “does not bend the total health care cost curve downward as a percentage of the economy.”
Consider what’s happened in Massachusetts since its 2006 health care reform went into effect. More people in the Bay State have health insurance–and costs keep on rising. RAND recently found that health care spending is growing 8 percent faster in Massachusetts than the state’s GDP. To deal with this situation, the state government has had to trim coverage and raise taxes. Even the New York Times editorial board has admitted that Massachusetts hasn’t figured out “how to slow the relentless rise in medical costs and private insurance premiums.”
ObamaCare’s Cost Could Top $6 Trillion. The Cato Institute.
When we correct for both gimmicks, counting both on- and off-budget costs over the first 10 years of implementation, the total cost of ObamaCare reaches — I’m so sorry about this — $6.25 trillion. That’s not a precise estimate. It’s just far closer to the truth than President Obama and congressional Democrats want the debate to be.
Beutler and other supporters of ObamaCare can react to this news in two ways. They can continue to deny the enormous cost of the legislation they support. Or they can question how President Obama’s health plan came to be so blessedly expensive, and how (and by whom) they were duped into thinking it wasn’t.
Common sense in Washington, D.C. seems to be glaringly absent. If others seem to easily distill the flaws inherent in the health care bills as noted now, why do politicians insist upon ignoring the evidence, and instead misleadingly portray themselves as knowing otherwise?
“Trust me.”
Image courtesy of Johnx1 of the Independents for News in Pictures November 16 – 22 http://www.freakingnews.com/News-in-Pictures-November-16-22-Pictures–2677.asp.
See:
- http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/267aexag.asp
- http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/11/27/obamacares-cost-could-top-6-trillion/
