The Week Private Health Care Was Saved?
Sunday, June 21st, 2009by Doug Bandow
Last week might be the week when private health care was saved.
Obviously, the current system has problems. We spend more than we should because of perverse incentives created by government. But the American system possesses enormous strengths, including quality of care and choice by patients. We have to defend these from any government takeover.
What may have saved American health care was the Congressional Budget Office coming up with honest estimates of the enormous cost of the legislation now being proposed by leading Democrats. Reports the Wall Street Journal:
This was supposed to be a red-letter week for national health care, as Democrats started the process of hustling a quarter-baked bill through Congress to reorganize one-sixth of the economy on a partisan vote. Instead it was a fiasco.
Most of the devastation was wreaked by the Congressional Budget Office, which on Tuesday reported that draft legislation from the Senate Finance Committee would increase the federal deficit by more than $1.6 trillion over the next decade while only partly denting the population of the uninsured. The details haven’t been made public, but the short version seems to be that President Obama’s health boondoggle prescribes vast new spending without a coherent plan to pay for it even while failing to meet its own standards for social equity.
Finance Chairman Max Baucus postponed the health timeline, probably until after Congress’s July 4 vacation. His team will try to scale down the middle-class insurance subsidies and make other cuts to hold the sticker shock under $1 trillion. (Oh, is that all?) Mr. Baucus also claims he’s committed to a bipartisan consensus, yet most Republicans have been closed out of the negotiations, and industry lobbyists have been pre-emptively warned that even meeting with the GOP will invite retribution.
Useful to emphasize amid the mayhem is that CBO’s number-crunching is almost always off — predicting too much spending for market-based policies and far too little for new public programs, especially on health care. The CBO score for a new entitlement is only the teaser rate, given that the costs will inevitably balloon as the years pass and more people mob “free” or subsidized insurance.
At a time when the U.S. government is effectively bankrupt, it can ill afford to embark upon yet another complicated and expensive exercise in social engineering. Even some Democrats appear to recognize this reality. It is incumbent upon us to make sure the rest of them learn figure this out as well.