Health Care Reform Battle
As Cato @ Liberty notes, the health care reform battle has begun.
I blogged about Michael D. Tanner’s Seven Bad Ideas for health care reform, a forward looking article that speculated on the types of requirements a liberal, big government approach to government mandated health care would feature. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass) has suggested all of them be incorporated into Obamacare.
Tanner points out that the Obama administration is planning a public relations campaign complete with rallies and photo-ops galore, but serious people need to start asking the serious questions.
The Washington Post, in an op-ed by Maya MacGuineas, cites the first of the serious questions: will the proposed savings from centralization be enough to pay for the expansion in government largess?
Some argue that universal coverage would decrease costs by expanding the risk pool (bringing healthy young people into the system) and by decreasing emergency room costs, because more people would get care before their illnesses become acute. There’s truth to both, but the savings are vastly outweighed by the costs of treating so many people who today get little or no care. Expanding insurance coverage would increase health-care spending by those who acquire insurance and add to overall health cost inflation.
Well, then, perhaps expanding coverage can be justified as the necessary “sweetener” in a package of tough measures to control costs? It’s true that Congress doesn’t much like all-pain-and-no-gain policies. But the administration’s proposal, even before Congress gets to work, is to spend $100 billion more on coverage while finding cost-saving measures worth only about a third as much. Another third would be paid for by tax increases. The last third, so far, isn’t paid for at all. That’s three times as much sweetener as medicine, in other words — and Congress will be tempted to jettison some of the savings and all of the tax increases.
Source: Washington Post – Health Reform’s Savings Myth.
MacGuineas notes that Congress has a habit of approving programs with no way to pay for them. As long as our headlines make greater note of the “accomplishments” of Congress and ignores the growing fiscal irresponsibility, elected representatives will continue to spend, spend, spend.
