Change We Can’t Afford
If the GOP wants to use a slogan to attack President Obama’s health care reforms, I’d suggest they use the slogan ‘Change we can’t afford’, especially after reading this AP article:
Guaranteeing health insurance for all Americans may cost about $1.5 trillion over the next decade, health experts say. That’s more than double the $634 billion ‘down payment’ President Barack Obama set aside for health reform in his budget, raising the prospect of sticker shock at a time of record federal spending. Administration officials have pointedly avoided providing a ballpark estimate, saying it depends on details to be worked out with Congress.
“It’s impossible to put a price tag on the plan before even the basics have been finalized,” said White House spokesman Reid Cherlin. “Here’s what we do know: The reserve fund in the president’s budget is fully paid for and provides a substantial down payment on the cost of the reforming our health care system.”
Still, the potential runaway costs are raising concerns among Republicans and some Democrats as Congress prepares to draft next year’s budget. The U.S. spends $2.4 trillion a year on health care, more than any other advanced country. And some experts estimate that a third or more of that goes for tests and procedures that provide little or no benefit.
Everyone’s heard the cliche that ‘If you think health care costs alot now, wait until it’s free.’ Letting the federal government, the people who did such a wonderful job regulating AIG, Fannie and Freddie, regulate and run our health care system isn’t just foolish. It’s dangerous.
To those that say that we don’t know what’s in the bill, I’d suggest we know alot about it because President Obama’s first choice for HHS Secretary, Tom Daschle, wrote about what that plan would look like. This WSJ article does a nice job outlining Sen. Daschle’s vision of health care reform:
The Health Blog, among others, had put Daschle on the short list for the job. And he’s gone to the trouble of writing a book about health care (Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis, published in Feb.) to give us a pretty clear sense of where he’d like to take things.
His basic idea: Create a board modeled on the Federal Reserve to “offer a public framework within which a private health-care system can operate more effectively and efficiently, insulated from political pressure yet accountable to elected officials and the American people.”
Thinking that government can run things efficiently isn’t factually supportable.
This should scare people:
The health care plan Obama offered as a candidate would have cost nearly $1.2 trillion over ten years, according to a detailed estimate last fall by the Lewin Group, a leading consulting and policy analysis firm. The campaign plan would not have covered all the uninsured, as most Democrats in Congress want to do. But it is a starting point for lawmakers.
John Sheils, a senior vice president of the Lewin Group, said about $1.5 trillion to $1.7 trillion would be a credible estimate for a plan that commits the nation to covering all its citizens. That would amount to around 4 percent of projected health care costs over the next 10 years, he added.
The cost of covering the uninsured is “a difficult hurdle to get over,” Sheils said in an interview. “I don’t know where the rest of the money is going to come from,” he added.
When the policymaking people can’t put a pricetag on their policy initiatives, that’s a red flag that tells me to run as fast in the opposite direction as fast as I can. The other red flag in these paragraphs is Mr. Sheils’ statement about a plan “that commits the nation to covering all its citizens.” I don’t have a problem with using the tax system and free market principles to make health care available at affordable prices. I’ve got serious problems, though, with a system that doesn’t look for ways to deliver important products at cheap prices. I’ve yet to see a government program that looks for cost effiencies. I have, however, seen government programs that cap prices paid out. Those things aren’t the same thing.
This isn’t comforting either:
Economist Len Nichols, who heads the health policy project at the New America Foundation, said he calculates that guaranteeing coverage will cost $125 billion to $150 billion a year, when fully phased in.
Nichols said the Obama administration is not being “cagy” but “strategic” in refusing to be pinned down on an estimate. Taxpayers will get a better idea when congressional committees try to draft legislation later this year. “Until that gets revealed by the Congress, it would be highly premature for the president to assert that sort of number,” Nichols said.
The fact that President Obama isn’t willing “to be pinned down on an estimate” is code for saying that he doens’t want people to really know how expensive his plan is.
This is a habit of the Obama administration. This time, they refuse to tell the American people what a major reshaping of the health care industry will cost. Earlier, they refused to let people see what the stimulus bill’s conference report contained before he signed it.
The Obama administration’s happy talk about accountability and transparency is spin. It isn’t reality. The Obama administration is about saying one thing, then doing the opposite. That’s something Republicans should hammer his administration on daily.
They should, and will, present a better alternative to President Obama’s and Prime Minister Speaker Pelosi’s policies.
Technorati Tags: Reforms, Health Care, Tom Daschle, President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Transparency, Accountabililty, Regulations, Bureaucrats
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
March 18th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Why would any congresspeople care what’s in the bill, anyway? They don’t read the things.